dan, 1 month ago

@dev meanwhile, in VHDL, booleans can have up to nine different values. That's twice as many as these floats!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_1164

ricci, 1 month ago

@dan @dev all my booleans are don't cares

kstatz12, 1 month ago

@ricci @dan @dev I sometimes declare a Boolean and never check it just to show how much I don't care

dev, 1 month ago

@kstatz12 @ricci @dan i leave lots of such stuff around so the compiler can get the joy of optimizing away most of my code.
I literally wrote an inefficient (but safer as it does not use unsafe code) function today with the comment
// we’ll let the compiler optimize this one

dan, 1 month ago

@dev @kstatz12 @ricci one of @irene's first jobs at VMware was to replace every if statement with a switch to see if that made the code size smaller.

Narrator: it didn't.

ricci, 1 month ago

@dan @dev @kstatz12 @irene I'll have my next new student put every line of code in single-case switch statements to see if the compiler is any good

dan, 1 month ago

@ricci @dev @kstatz12 @irene 20+ years ago, I read a webpage about object-oriented programming that said, without a hint of irony, "every if statement is a lost opportunity to use dynamic polymorphism" and that phrase has been living in my head since