OT: programming (was OT More pens)

> > ::pet peeve:: As a programmer/analyst, I am immensely tired of todays
> > point&click programmers who have no idea of the wasted overhead and bad
> > code
> > they generate when they let the interpreter/compiler generate the real
> > code.
>
>Knowing that compilers aren't too efficient is very good alright, but
>writing
>everything in ASCII isn't really a realistic alternative, is it? Or am I
There are very few people today who would need to write ASCII or EBCDIC, but
there are a few rare instrances when this might be the solution (e.g.
patches to bugs in existing modules/applications).

>misunderstanding you? "Point&click" doesn't really seem to fitting to my
>(amateurish) programming habits.
It goes deeper than that, and depends on scape - is the code intended for
personal use? or distribution to thousands worldwide.

I'm not sure this list needs lessons in the hows, why & methods of efficent
programming.

But let's take a simple but exagerated (I hope) example:

I want to add two numbers  together and display the result using programming
language X.
In language X and I have two choices:
    write 2 lines of primitive code:  A + B = C     and   DISPLAY C
or
    write 1 line using a built-infunction: DISPLAYSUM (A, B).

On the surface, the 2nd seems simpler - only one line.
But behind DISPLAYSUM is a long list of code -
1. determine via many steps how many arguments are given
2. determine via many steps the type of each argument, and extract the
digists from each
3. use those digits to create internal floating-point numbers
4. run a loop to add together all the floating-point numbers from as many
arguments as were initially given.
5. convert the result from that loop into a a format a human can readily
understand
6. display that result.

If the point&click GUI (graphical user interface) always uses DISPLAYSUM, a
lot of processing power has been wasted to do a very simple operation.

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