Re: Issue 37 - new work

[Graham Percival]

On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 05:42:56PM -0200, Han-Wen Nienhuys wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 28, 2011 at 4:43 PM, Graham Percival
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > That's actually precisely why I'm suggesting a
> >  -p X
> > option.  People (generally) aren't going to look into the depths
> 
> that's even worse, because people that will want to use this option
> won't even understand what it does.  It's the same time of idiocy of
> Windows' and IE settings: do you want low, medium or high for hardware
> acceleration, internet privacy.

address@hidden:~$ gunzip --help
Usage: gzip [OPTION]... [FILE]...
Compress or uncompress FILEs (by default, compress FILES
in-place).

[...]

  -V, --version     display version number
  -1, --fast        compress faster
  -9, --best        compress better


oh dear.  I hope that nobody uses these terrible command-line
switches to gzip!  At least bzip2 doesn't make this same
mistake... oops, no wait, it also has -1 .. -9 options!

This is terribly disheartening.  I'd better go off and download
some pirated tv shows... oh no!  Most popular video encoding
software has a "quality" setting, too!

ok, I guess I'll go drown myself in C programming.  Surely gcc
wouldn't be stupid enough to provide multiple optimization
levels... oh noes!  -O -O0 -O1 -O2 -O3 -Os !


I see nothing wrong with providing "easy-to-use" optimization
levels, as long as it's possible to "dig down" and find out what
they all do.  I've happily used -O2 for years without once looking
at it.  A few months ago, I tried doing some heavy optimizations,
so I went and looked at the difference between -O2 and -O3 and
what --funsafe-math-optimizations did (I was especially curious
because the latter produced incorrect answers for my program!).
But I don't see anything dangerous about having -Ox switches in
general.

Cheers,
- Graham