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Someone wrote: >the accepted wisdom that premature optimization is evil? Here's what that accepted wisdom means: A well-structured program is an important prerequisite for optimizing dynamic evaluation, because it leaves you the flexibility to optimize precisely the things that a profiler tells you are the bottlenecks, and the resulting code is still maintainable. But optimizing dynamic evaluation is also a kind of design, and it is is not the only kind of optimization. All design is optimization. In the early phases, it is best to optimize the understandability of a model and its applicability to a variety of usage scenarios. The most important bottleneck is often the human being who needs to deal with markup. Is the markup hand-edited? What tools are used for this editing - is it harder to work with attributes using these tools? Will a human being need to look at instances and write programs or formulate queries? If so, hiding the real action in the PSVI or Information Set may be a problem. In some few environments, it may also be important to optimize for certain desired mathematical properties. Human beings, editing tools, and mathematical properties are rather inflexible. It's good to plan for them early on. Jonathan
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