Re: Anyway of knowing whether a integer is odd or even

On Tue, 09 Oct 2001 16:18:09 -0400, you wrote: >Is > >if ($theInt & 1) > >really that much harder to read than > >if ($theInt % 2 > 0) > >? This is subjective of course, but... yes. "(x%2)" is the most common way to derive odd and even numbers. Manuals and tutorials use it, prime-sieves use it. Bit-masks aren't in common use outside systems programming. The programmer that has to follow you 6 months down the line doesn't care that you shaved a few clock cycles off by being clever... he does care that you left him clean, easily readable code. MOD is also the more general solution - how would you change the code to colour every nth line red? (BTW, a quick test show that 1 billion (i&1) in a loop execute in 9 seconds, while (i%2) execute in 12 seconds. C (not PHP), MSVC++6, PIII800. Which means I gain 3 billionths of a second on each test if I use the bitwise operator.) >And why wouldn't you want to get the most performance out of your code, >regardless of the language, scripting or otherwise? Especially when it's a >one or two character switch that makes the difference? Because programmer time is /vastly/ more valuable than machine time. Do you remove comments from your scripts because parsing /* */ // symbols soaks up CPU time? >I doubt that PHP should be classified as a scripting language any more >than Perl is. Scripting languages are usually used to glue different >applications together, like a shell script that uses awk and sed or >whatever. PHP can be used to build applications, so it's more than a >scripting language. Interpreted language is more like it. "Scripting language" is a common-usage synonym for "interpreted language", and has been for several years. ("Your search for scripting language found 387 results on www.perl.com.") http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/Python.html Not that I don't agree with you... djo