> Also, reasoning about the performance of C is all well and good right up until you realize that your compiler is better at translating C to assembler than you

> Also, reasoning about the performance of C is all well and good right up until you realize that your compiler is better at translating C to assembler than you are The difference being that in this case, the code performs better than I assumed. Nobody minds that. In C++, the usual results are that it performs worse than assumed. Significantly worse. > some jackass wrote a preprocessor macro called "foo" which does 18 different things Yes. There is that. Thankfully, they are rare. (I'd rate the preprocessor as by far the worst part of C. Amongst other things, it costs us any number of tools that could help us reason about code)