Re: time wasters for 9grid

> People still think that function calls are expensive and they don't
> profile their code (or don't get instruction counts) to find out where
> the time is going.

my favourite example of this was some years ago when someone came to
me wondering why the imap code was taking more than a minute to read
their 160K mail box.

part of the code contained a 160 line macro (!), epitomising many of
the evils of premature optimisation and non-portable coding, full of
idioms like:

	if(*(int*)x[i] ==0x6d6f7266

with an 40 line comment attached along the lines of "so you actually
want to try to understand this macro?!".

anyway, after a bit of delving, most of the macro was replaced with a
strstr(x, "from") and the runtime went from 100s down to 2s.

wonderful stuff, free software.