Hacker News Reader

No. The "true" or "false" value of a simple expression isn't stored in memory. It's stored as a bit in the status register as a side effect of the "cmp" instruction†. It is no faster for "cmp" to set "true" than it is to set "false".

† (CMP is actually setting carry, overflow, sign, zero, &c; "truth" or "falsity" is decided by the specific conditional jump, here JL, which checks if sign != overflow).

View on HN

That's not what I was saying. I was indicating that more memory accesses would be required in unsorted data for the `sum += data[c]` computation, obviously overlooking that data[c] is already in a cache, and probably in a register as a result of the comparison with 128.

Yes, the value is in a register.

But that is true whether the array is sorted or not; the indexes (and therefore memory accesses) in the loop are still in order even if the contents of the array are not sorted.

The counter also doesn't need cache; it gets assigned a register.

I know. Let me state it another way.

"I was wrong, but not in the way that you(tptacek) understood me to be."

For the record: I acknowledge that you were not wrong in the way I understood you to be wrong; I responded because I got the sense that the thread was now discussing the storage of boolean expression results, and klaxons inside my nerd brain started going off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com