Jürgen Hestermann wrote:
Mantra: First make it work, then make it fast.
In general that's true from the programmer's viewpoint. But this does
not apply to adding language details because there is no 'first make it
work'. Why obscure important implementation details if the only benefit
is saving some writing?
I won't judge on the "only save some writing" here, but generally it
*does* apply to language features: If a particular language feature
helps you writing correct code faster (by supporting you to make it work
instead of relying on your abilities to use the debugger), then it does
apply.
The real question is if the (or any other) proposal is "good enough" to
do just that, or if it's really some syntactic sweetener (not even
sugar, sugar at least contains energy). That's something to discuss.
Let me take a rather extreme point of view: After all, all those for-,
while-, and repeat-until-loops are only there to save you from some
typing work[0], because Pascal already has a perfectly good
loop-construct with which you can do all that: goto. Would you agree
here? Probably not.
> BTW, any performance differences in the example above highly depends
> on the work done in the loop body anyway, so whining about possible
> performance issues is quite a bit premature here. ;)
Maybe, but you started talking about performance. ;-)
Nono, you did: "Everything that obscures what's going on under the hood
has the potential to generate performance problems."
IMO, almost every language construct of a modern language (modern as in
"invented about 30 years ago") has the potential to just do that. Loops
may hide costly branches, string concatenations may hide costly memory
copy operations (not even talking about AnsiStrings here, where an
additional overhead of memory allocation/deallocation may occur), costly
lookups and indirect calls are hidden by virtual methods that may look
like simple procedure calls, or the worst: operator overloading enables
the programmer to hide practically anything inside a simple "+" (nothing
stops you from doing "c = a + b" where "a" and "b" are pulled from an
internet daabase and "c" is stored back there, all hidden in a simple
addition), etc. pp.
Even in C (which is a language widely accepted as one where nothing is
hidden from the programmer[1]) you can assign structs to each other
which - depending on the size and layout of the structure - may result
in rather costly memory copy operations.
So to get to the point, finally: The argument that some particular
language construct has the potential to generate performance problems is
NIL. IMNSHO.
Vinzent.
[0] By removing the need for labels.
[1] Nothing but bugs, hehe. :-> SCNR.
_______________________________________________
fpc-pascal maillist - fpc-pascal@lists.freepascal.org
http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-pascal
