I'm not sure "premature" is the right word. I mean, they benchmarked, and maybe even profiled, and made it faster. My guess is that somone had a weird use cas

I'm not sure "premature" is the right word. I mean, they benchmarked, and maybe even profiled, and made it faster. My guess is that somone had a weird use case for echo where the old version was slow. He benchmarked, profiled, made some changes, and submitted a patch. "The source code is too long," is a crappy argument, so might as well use the faster, longer code.