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Date: Fri, 5 Mar 2004 19:22:00 -0800
From: Chris Pressey <cpressey@catseye.mine.nu>
To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
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Subject: Re: FreeBSD Most wanted
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On Sat,  6 Mar 2004 02:55:35 +0100
Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr> wrote:

> Daniela wrote:
> > I like doing AI programming, that's numbercrunching most of the time.
> > 
> > A compiler can't, for example, know whether you need to have zero returned 
> > from the atoi() function when the user entered nonsense. If you don't need to 
> > check whether the user has entered a valid number, you can do it *much* 
> > faster.
> 
> Excellent example.  Here you're limited by the speed of the fingers of
> the user who's entering the data, so there's *absolutely no point* in
> optimising the atoi() function in this way.  (Or if you're reading from
> the disk, the disk I/O will be the bottleneck, though it's admittedly
> faster than fingers.)

I don't understand your point... atoi() is not an I/O function.

-Chris