Re: Is there demand for algorithm optimization?

From: Michael Furman (MichaelFurman_at_Yahoo.com)
Date: 03/11/04 

Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2004 12:31:54 -0800

"CBFalconer" <cbfalconer@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:4050B56A.6332169@yahoo.com...
> [...]
>
> There is a story about some programmer who had to update a program
> that used Boyer-Moore string searching. He didn't understand it,
> and replaced it with a brute force search.
>
> I also have very rarely seen a program that couldn't be improved
> in at least one way. Criteria include clarity, portability,
> object code size, modifiability, running time. This even includes
> _some_ of mine :-).
>

When I worked for a geophisical equipment company I had a manager
who believed that to make code fast he had to write it in assembler.
Whet he asked me to optimize some math functions that he wrote
earlier on assembler I could not resist to teas him and reimplemented them
in C and make them ~10 times faster!

               Michael Furman