Bill de hÓra

This is so true, and a real pity people simply spend too much time on premature optimization.

I wonder where you get this quote from? URL please ;-) Thanks.

Stephen,

The quote comes from here:

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/c455-c511.updated.txt

It's still true. In the years since I wrote that little blurb, I have used the same kinds of techniques for everything from programming languages research (such as http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jsobel/Recycling/recycling.pdf) to high-reliability, high-performance systems (even at the device driver level) in commercial systems. It still works. If your solution is clear enough, it will be obvious how to optimize it; if your solution is a prematurely optimized mess, you won't be able to figure out how to do anything to make it significantly faster.