palordrolap

Naive calculus tells me they should order 31 $32 bots.

Less naive strategy suggests ordering three $333 bots, pick the best of the three and give the other two the night off.

… but beware of any early repayment fees. Some companies really want all that interest whether you pay it as interest or not.

Yeah, I’ve actually written quick and dirty code that used both a division and a modulus, but then went back later to use the former to calculate the latter with a multiplication and a subtraction to get a speed improvement.

There have been other occasions where I’ve been able to replace something like average = sum / count; if average > y with if sum > count * y, when it’s not entirely obvious that y could be multiplied by anything and remain meaningful.

But when a division can’t be avoided, you still want that genius-written magical library to take some of the sting out of it.

The mention of division has triggered a memory. I think I actually saw a library like that once. It was in C, not assembly, and was almost certainly for one specific architecture (probably Intel), but other than that, there was a lot of low-level stuff that claimed to make division faster for all CPU-native data types.

It was above my skill level to just pick up and use, let alone read and understand, but I can tell you that it at least looked legit, and the author seemed earnest in their description, so something like your hypothetical is very much out there.

Nintendon’t on account of their rabid intellectual property protection and litigious nature.

Works as both what they might say to would-be infringers as well as advice to avoid them. (Which people ignore because Zelda, Mario and childhood memories.)