Or it could be made faster because certain manual optimizations become possible. An example would a table of interned strings that you wanna match against (say

Or it could be made faster because certain manual optimizations become possible. An example would a table of interned strings that you wanna match against (say you're writing a parser). Since standard C says thou shall not compare pointers with < or > unless they both point into the same 'object' you are forbidden from doing the speed of light code: char *keywords_begin, *keywords_end; if(some_str >= keywords_begin && some_str < keywords_end) ... Official standard sanctioned workarounds would require extra indirection (using indices for example) which is suboptimal.