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From: kcline17@hotmail.com (Kevin Cline)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Anybody in US using ADA ? One silly idea..
Date: 21 Jan 2003 10:55:36 -0800
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Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message news:<ga3q2vkds5akg0iaommdaniqp3ubo293pl@4ax.com>...
> On Tue, 21 Jan 2003 02:10:37 GMT, "Hillel Y. Sims"
> <usenet@phatbasset.com> wrote:
> 
> >"Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de> wrote in message
> >news:b0e5vu$ognn6$1@ID-77047.news.dfncis.de...
> >> Hillel Y. Sims wrote:
> >>
>  [templated C++ sort() is faster than qsort()]
> >>
> >> This is a wrong comparison. A correct one would be an instance of a
>  generic
> >> subroutine vs. an inlined subroutine and, note, when the type is
>  statically
> >> known.
> >
> >sort<int>() vs. sort_ints()? In that case the performance should really be
> >exactly the same (since as you say, it really *is* to a large extent just a
> >bunch of text substitution :-). The benefit is that you don't need to
> >rewrite or copy/paste the code over and over for each unique type, the
> >compiler does it automatically (while maintaining full type safety, unlike
> >dumb macros) -- and better yet, when you fix a bug in the generic version,
> >it is immediately fixed for all instantiations automatically (vs.
> >sort_ints(), sort_floats(), sort_strings(), sort_xyz())
> 
> This is an advantage of generics over blind preprocessing. The problem
> is whether same can be achieved without both.
> 
> Consider class-wide sort written for all arrays derived from some
> abstract array of comparable elements. If that sort is inlined, then
> then compiler theoretically would have all necessary information to
> make code as efficient as generic sort could. Presently it is
> impossible in both Ada and C++.

But then to be sortable the element type would have be derived from
some "Comparable" base type.  And to be stored in a hash table,
they would have to be derived from a "Hashable" base type.  And to be
used with some generic mathematical algorithm they would have to
be derived from an "Arithmetic" base type...