does white space slow down processing

Question

I have huge amounts of data to analyze, I tend to leave space between words or variable names as I write my code, So the question is, incases where efficiency is the number

Answer 1

The only part this can affect is the parsing of the source code into tokens. I can't imagine that the difference in parsing time would be significant. However, you can eliminate this aspect by compiling the functions using the compile or cmpfun functions of the compiler package. Then the parsing is only done once and any whitespace difference can not affect execution time.