There will have to be some kind of if statement to determine the state of that switch...
Tell me you're not serious. Wow yeah that extra if statement is enough reason not to implement it because it'll slow down mIRC!!! Even in the scripting language, doing 1 if statement for a switch is instant, I'm thinking a compiled if statement is even faster. Please...
I think he means a special way (some strange characters or so) to prevent "item : price" showing up like "item rice", or reducing the likelihood of such occurrences.
I know what he means, and my reply to him is that it's simply not necessary. So what if item:price will transform : p in a smiley? This is just the same in MSN, and is one of those things a person will have to cope with if they have smilies enabled. But this is of no importance to you, since you won't enable smilies anyway, so what do you care?
A channel window is not a picwin in mIRC 6.16, not because Khaled actively refuses us the possibility to draw lines all over our backlog, but because it's a lot easier and faster to code and to execute that code. Scrolling back in some channels where people drown their messages in color codes is already slow on my computer, I'm afraid graphics will not improve that.
No doubt, scrolling back would slow down the computers, but once again, that is IF you have smilies enabled. If you don't like that it slows down the screen when scrolling, then don't enable smilies, what's so hard about that to understand?
mIRC still needs to parse everything in the file, otherwise it won't find the end of the #group and anything behind it that's not disabled. If I send you to a big stadium or a big concert and tell you to only do something when you see some specific person, you're not doing nothing before you see him, you'll have your hands (eyes?) full checking every person to see if it's the one...
Haha, the only thing to remember from my example is that if you have it disabled, the overhead will be minimum, not worthy to debate over even. Besides the concert example is hardly relevant. When the parser finds the first #group off, it just has to go line by line sequentially checking for the first word being #group, that's hardly intensive is it? Definitely not the same as dropping a person in some concert in the middle of a lot of people....
Here's a quick example:
In my main mIRC folder i have the entire
versions.txt which is 10069 lines long, total of 464770 bytes.
We do a search for the text "First public release" which is the last string in the entire file.
//var %a = $ticks | .fopen versions
versions.txt | .fseek -w versions First public release. | echo -a Time taken: $calc($ticks - %a) * Position in file: $fopen(versions).pos | .fclose versions
Time taken: 15 * Position in file: 464745
Result: It took 15 milliseconds on my computer
and I can imagine this working even faster in compiled code. That's some overhead!!!! [/sarcasm]
Let's just ask Khaled to stop putting in new features, that way we are sure no extra if comparisons are necessary, so that mIRC doesn't get slower anymore!!!
Wow sarcasm galore :tongue:
PS: I don't know if you've ever used Klient (which does support smilies, or atleast last time I used it), but look what the author has to say about smilies and speed concerns:
A few people have made comments about the speed. So, I'll comment that Klient does not parse anything as it is displayed. Everything is parsed once, when the line is first added (then perhaps later if options are changed and it has to re-parse display $masks, etc.). Its pretty efficient, and parsing for smilies is no worse than parsing for color codes, http hyperlinks, etc.
So, don't worry too much about the speed; it couldn't possibly be noticed by a human even if it were enabled (and it would be even less noticeable if it was disabled!)
Of course Klient and mIRC are two different IRC clients, but don't give people the impression it's going to cause heavy overload, when it is proven it can be programmed in a way where this isn't the case.
