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Comment Re:A Natural Progression Yet So Many Caveats (Score 1) 578

There is another argument which is all too prevalent among enthusiastic language designers, that efficiency of object code is no longer important; that the speed and-capacity of computers is increasing and their price is coming down, and the programming language designer might as well take advantage of this.

This is an argument that would be quite acceptable if used to justify an efficiency loss of ten or twenty percent, or even thirty and forty percent. But all too frequently it is used to justify an efficiency loss of a factor of two, or ten, or even
more; and worse, the overhead is not only in time taken but in space occupied by the running program.

In no other engineering discipline would such avoidable overhead be tolerated, and it should not be in programming language design.

                                                    -- C.A.R. Hoare, 1973

Biotech

Texas Makes Zombie Fire Ants 398

eldavojohn writes "What do you do when a foreign species has been introduced to your land from another continent? Bring over the natural predator from the other continent. Scientists in Texas have introduced four kinds of phorid flies from South America to fight fire ants. These USDA approved flies dive bomb ants and lay an egg inside the ant. The maggot hatches and eats away juicy tender delicious ant brain until the ant is nothing more than a zombie that wanders around for two weeks before the head falls off and the ant dies. A couple of these flies will cause the ants to modify their behavior and this will be a very slow acting solution to curb the $1 billion in damage these ants do to Texas cattle ranches and — oddly enough — electrical equipment like circuit breakers. You may remember zombifying parasites hitting insects like cockroaches."

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