Re: commenting out a SCHEDULED line does not remove todo from agenda.

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> On 17.1.2013, at 06:02, Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com> wrote:
> 
> > ...
> > It sets p to the point at the beginning of the line and then
> > checks if the character after it is '#'. Only then does it skip
> > the entry.
> 
> And this is done for speed.  Maybe Moore's law has progressed enough to relax this assumption?
> 

For me, probably yes: my agenda is fairly simple. More complicated
agendas still seem to take a fairly substantial time to construct
however - Bastien spent considerable effort recently to speed up the
agenda and might look askance at any attempt to slow it down :-)

But actual numbers would carry more weight than any guesses I might
make.  Here is a (probably stupid) implementation of the generalized
mechanism.  In org-agenda-skip, replace

     (if (equal (char-after p) ?#) (throw :skip t))

with

     (save-excursion
      (goto-char p)
      (skip-chars-forward "[:blank:]")
      (if (equal (char-after) ?#) (throw :skip t)))

Assuming it's correct (and no better implementation is suggested), maybe
somebody with a time-consuming agenda can try profiling with and without
the generalized mechanism and let us know.

I tried with my agenda which calls org-agenda-skip 5768 times. Without
the mod, they took 0.13s; with the mod, they took 0.19s, so that's a 50%
increase - but the overall time was actually shorter in the second case:
1.64s vs 1.72s.  The data look noisy however (I only tried it once in
each case) so it's hard to say anything meaningful. I'd need to run many
more experiments before I'd trust these numbers.

Nick