Thanks. Beatifully written and I love the print-shop analogy.

It's nice he is into the C&C Portland Wiki, there's golden nuggets of wisdom everywhere. I am reposting the link from his blog. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler

Personally of the higher-level languages, I found SBCL to be crazy good at optimizing, of course given a few nudges with a compiler directive or two. By inspecting the dissasembly, I could validate it was doing the "right-thing" (TM), but then again, I do the same to check the C/C++ compiled code.