>It's not "forgotten" wisdom from the golden ages; nobody ever abided by anything like it. Unless you count Niclaus Wirth as a nobody, this isn't true. And in

>It's not "forgotten" wisdom from the golden ages; nobody ever abided by anything like it. Unless you count Niclaus Wirth as a nobody, this isn't true. And in general what you wrote is not true --the gist is to be pragmatic about optimizations. >* but I'll eat my hat if they started out by stating this "principle", rather than just noticing after the fact that it had happened.* Well, eat your hat then, because Wirth was quite aggressive on following that route and he did state it from the beggining.