Mike Ford wrote:
> It was really many years later into my professional career that I learned
> to "spill some blood" and let the compiler find a few errors instead of
> spending so much time actually writing the initial code.
It's certainly the case that as a consequence of all the time I spent
writing code in assembly lanaguage (and all those damn code generation
and optimization courses!) that I always find myself thinking in terms
of what kind of code I expect the compiler to generate as a consequence
of the way I structure my code. On the other hand, there are some things
that the compiler is simply better at than I am; a good example of this
is instruction scheduling, particularly on superscalar machines. I'd
rather the compiler figure out how to keep the pipes full and avoid
slips rather than spend my time doing so (and probably screwing it up).
On a related topic, I too miss greenbar. Lots of room to scribble
out new code and my scrawled representations of the data structures,
all bound together in one place. I still do this on the stuff that
spews out of laser printers, but there's not nearly enough real
estate and I always end up with extra bits of paper that I am
almost certain to lose at some point or another.
--
Chris Kennedy
chris_at_mainecoon.com
http://www.mainecoon.com
PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97
Received on Mon Jun 19 2000 - 19:10:59 BST