Question

I have a C# .NET 2.0 script and I want to know why the following code would be faster than a do while loop of the same kind.

private double getStop(double avgPrice, bool longTrading)
    {
        double stopS = 0.0;
        double stopL = 0.0;

        for (int i = 0; i < 13; i++)
        {
            if (i == 0 || i == 12)
            {
                stopS = 0.0;
                stopL = 0.0;
            }
            else
            {
                if ((lines[i] - ((lines[i] - lines[i - 1]) / 2)) < avgPrice && avgPrice < (lines[i + 1] - ((lines[i + 1] - lines[i]) / 2)))
                {
                    if (avgPrice < lines[i])
                    {
                        stopL = (lines[i] - ((lines[i] - lines[i - 1]) / 2));
                        stopS = lines[i];
                    } else {
                        stopL = lines[i];
                        stopS = (lines[i + 1] - ((lines[i + 1] - lines[i]) / 2));
                    }
                }
            }
        }

        if (longTrading)
        {
            return stopL;   
        } else {
            return stopS;   
        }   
    }

Also, would it be faster just to explicitly state each if statement instead of doing them inside of a for loop?

Being that this was answered so fast, why would this run far slower than the above code?

private double getStop(double avgPrice, bool longTrading)
    {
        double stopS = 0.0;
        double stopL = 0.0;

        for (int i = 0; i < 13; i++)
        {
            if (i == 0 || i == 12)
            {
                stopS = 0.0;
                stopL = 0.0;
                skip = true;
            }

            if (!skip && (lines[i] - ((lines[i] - lines[i - 1]) / 2)) < avgPrice && avgPrice < (lines[i + 1] - ((lines[i + 1] - lines[i]) / 2)))
                {
                    if (avgPrice < lines[i])
                    {
                        stopL = (lines[i] - ((lines[i] - lines[i - 1]) / 2));
                        stopS = lines[i];
                    } else {
                        stopL = lines[i];
                        stopS = (lines[i + 1] - ((lines[i + 1] - lines[i]) / 2));
                    }
                }
            }
           skip = false;
        }

        if (longTrading)
        {
            return stopL;   
        } else {
            return stopS;   
        }   
    }

Answer 1

They should be essentially equivalent. Your ‘for’ loop gets evaluated as:

int i = 0;
while (i < 13)
{
   //all other stuff
   i++;
};