>Mike,
>
>>That is two standards - the percentage is irrelevant. Just as "faster" is "faster" no matter the percentage.
>
>Code readability is far more important in the long run of an application than shaving microsecond off loop execution speed.

I guess the ratio between time programmer spends solving a speed issue against the accumulated time the users may be wasting with the slower version is usually more than 2:1... but for the sake of the few cases when it gets to be 1:10 or better, I'd rather stay in shape (the shape of a bottleneck waiting to be wider)

>And more seriously if developers are writing loops that have thousands or more iterations in an interpretted language like VFP they need to evaluate higher performance options. I've seen far too many examples where a single SELECT or UPDATE SQL statement could have been used rather than a loop. Too many FoxPro developers are stuck back in 2.x mentality.

Worse... Cobol or VB6 mentality :). I've seen recursion down a self-referencing table (organizational structure of an institution) using a new SQL statement into a cursor at each step, including the end nodes - if it returns zero records, it's an end node. A single rip field would make that sequential single pass (which I did eventually, at factor of 20).

Even inside Cobol... there were ways and ways. I remember shortening a logical condition from eight lines to two (and I left it in two lines for readability's sake).