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[Rahul Siddharthan]

Chris Pressey said on Mar  5, 2004 at 19:22:00:
> On Sat,  6 Mar 2004 02:55:35 +0100
> Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd at online.fr> wrote:
> 
> > Daniela wrote:
> > > I like doing AI programming, that's numbercrunching most of the time.
> > > 
> > > A compiler can't, for example, know whether you need to have zero returned 
> > > from the atoi() function when the user entered nonsense. If you don't need to 
> > > check whether the user has entered a valid number, you can do it *much* 
> > > faster.
> > 
> > Excellent example.  Here you're limited by the speed of the fingers of
> > the user who's entering the data, so there's *absolutely no point* in
> > optimising the atoi() function in this way.  (Or if you're reading from
> > the disk, the disk I/O will be the bottleneck, though it's admittedly
> > faster than fingers.)
> 
> I don't understand your point... atoi() is not an I/O function.

Where did the "a" in the "atoi" come from?

The point is that some very slow i/o routine gives you an ascii string
(that's the only reason you'd ever need to deal with an ascii string),
and then the C library's atoi() converts that to an integer.  Now,
what's the advantage of optimising atoi()?

R