in reply to RE (tilly) 1: Expand your world
in thread Expand your world
I have trouble with your assertion that this will be more efficient. Any gain in perfomance by using a hash instead of an if-else clause is going to be offset by the multiple eval()s. I also contend that it is just as easy to add another elsif as to add another key-value pair to the hash. Anyway, that's just my opinion.
|
R (tilly) 3: Expand your world
by tilly (Archbishop) on Aug 20, 2000 at 11:30 UTC
|
If you have a long list of arguments, it will be.
First of all evals don't cost much more than just having
had that much code in the first place. Secondly all of
the evals take place up front. So it is just like having
a longer program.
But at runtime I have a hash lookup (constant time no
matter how large the hash is) rather than repeated tests,
So I have traded compile time away for faster run-time
behaviour.
FWIW I first realized the importance of this win when
trying to speed up a program that categorized states into
ACLI regions for a huge amount of text information. Just
moving the logic out of if/elsif/elsif/else type constructs
into hash lookups and/or smart REs was an order of magnitude
improvement.
Cheers,
Ben | [reply] |