Re: Version after Version

"Frank de Groot" <franciad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:g1K8f.496$Ti5.16479@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> "Maarten Wiltink" <maarten@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:436360ab$0$11076$e4fe514c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

>> I tend to do my operations one method call at a time, not MxN bits at a
>> time.
>
> Are you saing that when you need to, say, add 1000 numbers in an array,
> thay you do this:
>
> for i := 0 to High(anArray) do
> AddNextNumber(anArray, i);

Without a second thought. When you say "number", do you mean real numbers
or imaginary? Integer or floating point? Signed or unsigned? Any chance of
overflow? Adding up all numbers in an array is a fold() of the addition
operator over it. My first priority is maintainable, extensible, robust,
clear code. Not optimisation. When it takes more than ten milliseconds,
I'll start worrying about it. Not before.


> That would be insane.
> I am sure you are not *that* stupid.

No, strangely I'm not. I'd use Low(), too.

If AddNextNumber is a TCollectionItem.Create(), how exactly would you
put that in parallel? _In my world_, that happens a lot more often than
summing up a block of integers.

I'll allow you your niche, and keep reasonably up to speed on it. Kindly
return the courtesy.


> What you say is nonsensical. Every time you do more than on 32-bit
> operation on an array for example, you can make things much faster by
> loading 64 bits at a time from memory (as my dual-cpu, dual-core 275
> machine does), operating on those 64 bits and write them back in one
> operation, to 64-bit wide memory.

What you say *depends*. I don't have many arrays. They rarely contain
integers. That rather lessens the "much" in your argument.


> When you can't imagine that applications do operations on data
> structures in memory, when your own applications don't do such a thing,
> merely do a few "method calls" here & there and for the rest waiting
> for user input, I feel for you.

Well, so would I. But you may take my word that my code is rather heavy
on data structures.


> But please don't think that all desktop software is like yours. Most
> isn't.

I don't think that. It looks like you do.


> Some of the software I recently bought is ISObuster (or something).
> It extracts ISO images (a kind of decompressing). This benefits
> greatly from 64-bits. Other software I bought is ASPack, it is an
> EXE compressor I use. This would benefit greatly from 64-bits. Other
> software I bought is Ghost install, to make installs of my 1.5 GB
> install package. The compression engine would benefit greatly from
> 64 bits. Other software I bought is Absolute Database. I use ZIP
> compression (LZW) of some fields in my 2 GB of databases. This would
> benefit greatly from 64-bits.

That's great. What software do you produce, and how would it benefit
from 64-bit processing? We do process modelling, and the last bit I
worked on was reporting. Not exciting, but it has to be done. Reports
are generated in Word, controlled through COM (not my choice). Please
explain how that is going to benefit from 64-bit processing.


> Etcetera, etcetera. You truly haven't got the slightest clue what
> you're talking about. EVERYTHING benefits GREATLY from 64 bits.

Sure. My last weekend project was a playlist generator, for my internal
webserver. Parse some arguments, walk a directory tree, generate HTML.
Does that fall under "EVERYTHING", or is it somehow excluded? And how
would it benefit GREATLY from 64-bit processing?

>From what I've seen so far, I understand what you're talking about but
you refuse to talk outside your little corner. A little more humility
would look really well on you.

Groetjes,
Maarten Wiltink


.

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