RE: Quick question on readability

In the old 8086/80286 days of PC's, I could (somewhat) understand
worrying about cycles.  I remember the discussions of "should I shift
left to multiply by 2 instead of *2", the comparison of the various C
compilers at the time (who remembers Lattice?), and that sort of thing. 
Nowadays, while not condoning lazy programming, why worry about a couple
of CPU cycles?  The optimizer can deal with that minutiae.  Again, I'll
trade readability over a couple of cycles.  

Ageed that it's probably easier for the compiler to be more efficient
with certain constructs, but the blanket statement that C is more
efficient shouldn't be taken at face value.  You really don't know what
the compiler has turned your construct into. 

AGlauser@xxxxxxxxxxxx 12/13/2006 11:22:46 AM >>>

Adam Glauser wrote:

var1   = (eval var2 = value)

That little eval is rather important, and I'm in agreement as well

that 

this is not something that should be used frequently.

Roger Harman wrote on 13/12/2006 02:11:19 PM:

Or maybe not used at all.  The nested eval is not all intuitive. 

I'll

take repetitive lines of code over that any day.

From the classic  "The Elements of Programming Style"..

   Write clearly - don't be too clever

I agree.  The only reason I could see to use the nested structure is
that 
it might save a few cycles.  Sometimes that is the case with similar 
constructs in C.  Of course, if you really need uber-efficiency that 
badly, C is probably a better bet anyway.