>Hi David
>
>Please pardon me for jumping in. This is not a remark to you, but to everyone who has contributed to this thread.
>
>I am totally amazed about the energy someone can use to save a few nanoseconds. How many thousand years must you use your applications to earn back the amount of time you have spent on this extremely important optimizing problem? <vbg>

well, now - let's see <s>

you are correct ofcourse, but

i remeber the days when computers were not so fast, and every splitt second you could gain was helpfull to speed up your app.

today, computers are ofcourse much faster, which resulted in the major problem:

us programers got SPOILED!

i think it is still imperative for a developer these days to understand and apply the basics. and i think i could com up with a few apps where it is still important to be able to cut down on proccessor time.

1 example, i would suspect, could be statistical calculations, going through a huge dbf. or another 1 id did a few years back: a calculation for lottery. that thing ran 3 month day and night. needless to say, every splitt second in the repeating loops were very valuable.

and there are many more.