[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [PATCH] more small directional cleanups

[Jason Dorje Short <jshort@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Ross W. Wetmore" wrote:

> I'm not sure I'm concerned about the 1000 failure case. The universe is
> something like 10^30 nanoseconds old, and the probability you are worried
> about is 1 in 10^500 or so.

But doesn't it make you more satisfied knowing the algorithm is correct?

> But would you be willing to amalgamate the flavours to something like this?

Personally I prefer my unchecked "look for neighbors until you find one"
code to your "check once, then use the safe algorithm" method.

I think your zeal is misplaced.  Efficiency is not a concern with this
function.

> Note, that you don't need to drag the enum values into it, since you never
> care about specific compass directions and the DIR_DX array is always size
> 8.

Well, in theory you could change the system to go 1-8 pretty easily by
removing direct accesses to DIR_DX/DIR_DY (use a macro instead) and
changing the other directional system stuff in map.h.  This would break
uncountedly many things throughout the code, though, and really has no
point that I can see.

jason