On Fri, 16 Sep 2005 20:05:04 -0400, Mike Meyer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >[EMAIL PROTECTED] (phil hunt) writes: >> Compilers/interpreters/runtimes are black boxes: we don't (or >> shouldn't) care how they do their work as long as they run correctly >> and aren't too heavy on system resources like CPU time and memory. > >Maybe in academia. Not in the real world. Or maybe you just phrased >that last clause poorly.
I think perhaps I did. > In the real world, programs have performance >constraints. Yes i know, that's why I said "aren't too heavy on system resources like CPU time and memory". > Some of them are seriously inflexible - in which case we >call what we're doing "real-time" or "embedded" or words to that >effect. If a program is too slow to respond isn't that about "system time"? >Others are softer, but in the end they matter *very much*. I >would have phrased that last clause to make reasonableness a >requirement, rather than making "not unreasonable" the requirement. > >Because of that, you have to care about how your implementation >works. If you don't know how strings work in Python, you tend to write >O(n^2) algorithms instead of O(n) ones for fundamental >operations. What does "CPU time" mean again? -- Email: zen19725 at zen dot co dot uk -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
