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From: dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: Equality operator overloading in ADA 83
Date: 1997/04/26
Message-ID: <dewar.862088714@merv>#1/1
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References: <01bc4e9b$ac0e7fa0$72041dc2@lightning> <dewar.861930356@merv>
 <E973qr.89t@world.std.com> <01bc5244$315f1560$28f982c1@xhv46.dial.pipex.com>
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Organization: New York University
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-04-26T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Bob Duff said

<<You mean a series of "if .. elsif .. elsif..."?  That's certainly not
the best approach, in general.  For testing large numbers of strings,
you might want some sort of table lookup (binary search, hash table, or
whatever).  The general style of Ada is to allow the *programmer* to
make that choice.>>

What makes you thnk a compiler cannot as easily do this kind of optimization
for a series of comparisons against constant strings as it could for a
possibly extededn version of the case statement.

Personally I doubt this optimization is worth while in either case, but it
is just as easy to do it in the if .. elsif .. elsif ... case if all
comparison values are static expressions (which allows you to detect
duplicates -- and hopefully give warnings when you detect them!)