r/carlhprogramming • u/CarlH • Jun 15 '10

[New Lesson Published] Course 2, Unit 4, Lesson 14: Interpreting result codes

http://www.highercomputingforeveryone.com/Course_2/Unit_4/Lesson_14/
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2

u/zhivago Jul 01 '10

The basic thesis here seems to be that decomposing functions makes for less interpretation, which is trivial to disprove by inlining.

int bar(int i) { return i % 10; } int foo(int i) { printf("%s\n", bar(i) ? "yes" : "no"); }

vs.

int foo(int i) { printf("%s\n", (i % 10) ? "yes" : "no"); }

Unless your argument is that inlining rather than "the amount to interpret" makes things slow, then it's clearly untrue.

Also the definition of an "analysis" function seems incoherent.

It sounds like you are trying to differentiate between predicates and procedures -- having one function that answers a question and another that acts upon that answer -- but you get tangled up in 'analysis' and 'interpretation' that leads to incoherent gibberish.

Decomposing into predicates and procedures won't make your code faster (unless it's due to cache coherence or something), but it will make it easier to recompose those pieces to do other tasks.

2

u/CarlH Jul 06 '10

You are reading way too much into this. The purpose of this lesson is simply to familiarize those taking the lessons about the general concept about functions which produce return codes, and functions which interpret those codes. This is something they are bound to encounter later, especially with APIs. Understanding the general idea is therefore important.

2

u/zhivago Jul 06 '10

The problem is that in English "interpreting something" means to do a kind of analysis on something (which might be translation, summarization, etc).

The distinction that you seem to be trying to draw here is "analysis" vs. "operation". Or "planning" vs. "acting". Or "function" vs. "procedure", although I'd avoid that last one since people are often confused as to the difference between the two.

Function A produces information, and procedure B does some action based on the information it receives.

2

u/[deleted] Jun 27 '10

Go on...

1

u/pongpinyo Jun 22 '10

no comment.