11SHORTCUTS AND APPROXIMATIONS
So far, we’ve spent a lot of time looking at how to compute efficiently, especially with regard to memory usage. But there’s one thing that’s better than computing efficiently, and that’s not computing at all. This chapter looks at two ways to avoid computing: taking shortcuts and approximating.
We think of computers as very exact and precise. But, as we saw in “Representing Real Numbers” on page 14, they really aren’t. We can write code to be as exact as we want. For example, the UNIX bc utility is an arbitrary precision calculator that’s perfect if you need lots of accuracy, but it’s not a very efficient approach ...
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