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[Rahul Siddharthan]

Daniela wrote:
> I like doing AI programming, that's numbercrunching most of the time.
> 
> A compiler can't, for example, know whether you need to have zero returned 
> from the atoi() function when the user entered nonsense. If you don't need to 
> check whether the user has entered a valid number, you can do it *much* 
> faster.

Excellent example.  Here you're limited by the speed of the fingers of
the user who's entering the data, so there's *absolutely no point* in
optimising the atoi() function in this way.  (Or if you're reading from
the disk, the disk I/O will be the bottleneck, though it's admittedly
faster than fingers.)

R