[fall through switch/case in perl brought about mention of Duff's Device. It turns out this construct is portable to Perl from c. Here's an old message to FWP about it.]

Duff's Device is an insane optimization originally invented to speed up writes to a serial device. The original is in c, but I wanted to see if I can code it in Perl.

It actually works, with a little kneading and much less of the original 50% performance gain. This is to be expected, because we're emulating pointer arithmetic for (not very) random string access. Another slowdown is the inavailibility of number-only labels. Anyone care to improve on Gaal's Gobbeldygook? <g>

[the assignment to $to in Perl is spurious, of course. Replace it with your particular write_one_char_to_device() function] 

use integer;
[...]
sub trivial_loop {
    my $from = shift;
    my $to;
    my $i;
    my $count = length $from;

    for ($i = 0; $i < $count; $i++) { $to = substr $from, $i, 1 }
}

sub duff {
    my $from = shift;  # real life would use reference here, this is a
+ demo
    my $to;            # dummy: simulate write to serial i/o port
    my $i = 0;

    my ($n, $count);
    $count = length $from;

    $n = ($count + 7) / 8; # use integer in effect

    goto l. ($count % 8);           # number-only labels don't work :-
+(
    l0: do {    $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l7:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l6:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l5:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l4:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l3:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l2:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
    l1:         $to = (substr $from, $i++, 1);
        } while (--$n>0);
}

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In reply to Duff's Device in Perl by gaal

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