@p

> This is the refrain when you complain that a low-level detail is incomprehensible.

Nemmine, finally saw the reference.

Reminds me of the guys (that C interpretor guy was a leader of them) who insisted hand optimization was stupid, the compiler would do all that. They tended to write huge masses of code, some of which like X-Windows actually did something useful, and some of which, like his C-terp, didn't.

Me, I enjoyed writing stuff like

{
register struct obj ** obj_next;
...
}
to tell the compiler that this var was only going to be used in this local scope, and that I wanted it kept in a register. The comliler was pretty stupid back then; gcc would probably do all this for one now, but back then one could see the difference in the generated assembly language. But I was at heart a firmware guy, almost a hardware guy at heart, and that's how we rolled. I really had no head for the huge sprawling projects, just wanted to make machine go fast vroom vroom.