I'd be interested to see how this weighs out in 5-10 years. Since there's no I/O here, I don't see why a clever compiler writer couldn't optimize this whole exp

I'd be interested to see how this weighs out in 5-10 years. Since there's no I/O here, I don't see why a clever compiler writer couldn't optimize this whole expression away at compile time, generating an executable just prints a constant.