From: Jeff Patterson <jeff_patterson@...>
Date: 2008-03-25T04:22:31+09:00
Subject: Re: Beginner's question

Good job. One thought though, as you are learning to program always keep 
in mind what is actually happening as your code is executed with an eye 
towards minimizing decision points, each of which which take time. For 
example, in your loop each time through two checks are made in a row:
while bottles != 0
  if bottles != 1

If instead you did:
while bottles != 1
  non-special code goes here..
 bottles=bottles -1
end

# note bottles = 1 here
#print out special case verse


See how we've eliminated the unnecessary decision point? Such 
optimizations are especially important inside loops where the interior 
code gets executed over and over.

Cheers
Jeff
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