Language comparisons

[Ben Hutchings]

grante at visi.com (Grant Edwards) writes:
<snip>
> For most of my career I've been working with compilers targetted at
> register-scarce 8 and 16 bit processors with no pipelines and no
> cache. With those compilers the code generated was quite
> predictable, and it behooved the programmer to know whether indexing
> through an array or incrementing a pointer through an array were
> faster for a particular architecture.

That's a 'feature' of old simple-minded compilers, not of their target
machine.  Regardless of which of those two ways you write your
iteration, a current C compiler will generate code that iterates in
whichever way is likely to be fastest on the target machines (if you
turn on basic optimisations) - whether those target machines use
68000-derivatives or UltraSparcs.

-- 
Any opinions expressed are my own and not necessarily those of Roundpoint.