Re: LuaJIT2 performance for number crunching

[Pierre Chapuis <catwell@...>]

On Wed, 16 Feb 2011 17:39:24 +0100, Mike Pall wrote:
> Philippe Lhoste wrote:
> > I always recommend to beginners in programming to replace magic
> > numbers with constants, for readability and consistency.
>
> You mean like a21, a31, a32 and so on as in the original code?
> Yeah, that improves readability like 1000%. :-)
>
> [The original author used this solely because Python doesn't
> fold constants.]
>
> Magic comes sparingly, and any not-so-magical constants might as
> well live inline.

The problem is not so much readability than flexibility. If I inline
a constant such as 32 in my code every time I refer to the size of
an integer I will have a problem the day I will want to make it 64.

In C I would not write "const int BITS = 32;" though, but rather
"#define BITS 32". Maybe what we're lacking is a pre-processor?

--
Pierre 'catwell' Chapuis