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>with an emphasis on Algorithm and Language did you mean algorithms and data structures?

• rramadass 2y ago
  No. Algorithms and Data Structures always go together (like Yin/Yang) and hence i did not spell that out. At the time the book was written Structured Programming techniques and control structures were somewhat new and people wondered whether it was possible to really write efficient programs using these in a high-level language. In the preface/introduction itself Bentley points this out and says he is looking at efficiency at the "Design Level"(various) and thus you have chapters like "Modifying Data Structures" (Time vs. Space) and "Modifying Code" (mainly Loop rules) which show one how to transform code in the same language to a better form (we know this today as helping the compiler generate better object code). As he points out in the book; people forget the constant factors in big-oh and much efficiency can be had by tweaking this. This is particularly true nowadays since there are so many interpreted/vm-based/jit-compiled/scripting languages where with some "under the hood" knowledge you can get good performance just by source level transformations.