>OTOH, more often than not shorter code is faster,
>
>I thought that we already agreed that this was not the case.
>
> but more importantly, better maintainable.
>
>ROFL and LOL!!! I could not disagree more. Very often, I have seen developers who have tried to be too cute and packed several function calls into a single IF statement. Not only is it hard to read, but when you step through the code trying to debug it, you have a hard time trying to find which function is the one that is failing.

Reluctantly i have to agree... ;)