Inefficiency of `mod'

[Rugxulo]

Hi,

On 10/25/10, Adriaan van Os <gpc at microbizz.nl> wrote:
>>
>> But Adriaan explicitly asked about standard Pascal
>
> You are right. But I wonder how many Pascal programmers are wrong here....
> It is very tricky. What about a compiler warning ?

C:\BLAH [ GPC ] >gpc --classic-pascal -s -O adrian.pas -o adrian.exe
-Wall -Wextra
adrian.pas: In main program:
adrian.pas:3: error: syntax error before `shr'

Consider that your warning. ISO doesn't support "shr".  ;-)   In all
seriousness, I would doubt the FPC answer would ever be considered
correct in this context (heh, 9 gazillion from "-2 shr 1"? highly
unlikely). I'm sure they'll be glad for a test case / bug report.

{ gp -s -O unary } { GPC 20070904, GCC 3.4.4 + DJGPP }
{ d:\fpc242\bin\go32v2\fpc -XXs -Os -al unary }
program unary;
begin
 writeln( -1       ); {-1}
 writeln(  2 shr 1 ); { 1}
 writeln((-2)shr 1 ); {GPC: -1  FPC: 9223372036854775807}
 writeln(-(2 shr 1)); {-1}
 writeln( -2 shr 1 ); {GPC: -1  FPC: 9223372036854775807}
 writeln( -2 div 2 ); {-1}
end.

I know this was meant to be a trivial case, and I'm probably stating
the extremely obvious, but ... just use Pascal's "div", that's what
it's for. Using BP's "shr" here (presumably same as x86's "sar"
instruction, which is what ANSI C ">>" uses, right??) is probably a
misguided case of premature optimization. Granted, as long as it works
for you ... but it's clearly not totally extremely obvious nor totally
portable. However, I'm no mathematician and hadn't truly stumbled upon
nor understood this previously myself.