From: Sean Carley <seanacarley@...>
Date: 2006-06-27T20:22:44+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] pp Pascal (#84)

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On 6/26/06, Suraj N. Kurapati <skurapat@ucsc.edu> wrote:
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> Sean Carley wrote:
> > My solution does have one aspect I haven't noticed in everyone's great
> > submissions so it might be illustrative, if nothing else - I wrote my
> > implementation test first.  Other than that, there isn't too much
> > novelty in my solution.
>
> IMHO there is too much re-computation of nth_row() in this
> implementation. See for yourself with this patch:
>

Suraj,

You are absolutely right that my implementation is not the most efficient.
You could even call it wasteful.  The thing is, I believe you should never
optimize prematurely.  Without specific data telling me my solution is too
slow, I would almost never rewrite it to be faster.  I would make changes to
make things more clear but not to make them faster.  I wouldn't optimize
until I knew the speed requirements.  For example, if the client came back
and said we need to complete the pascal triangle of 1000 in under 10
seconds, then I would start profiling to find out how to make that happen.

Sean

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