Well... (8) It is more complicated than you think --RFC 1925[^] :-D If the Lord God Almighty had consulted me before embarking upon the Creation, I would have recommended something simpler. -- Alfonso the Wise, 13th Century King of Castile. This is going on my arrogant assumptions. You may have a superb reason why I'm completely wrong. -- Iain Clarke [My articles]

We already have checks for boiler plate code, but I've tightened them up even more cheers, Chris Maunder The Code Project | Co-founder Microsoft C++ MVP

My suspicion as well. Apart from being able to say that you are "published", which is not strictly true; only the serious contributor will use the criticism to improve their publishing skills. I suppose it's the problem with all students, they know too much :-) Conrad - The world waits for you to stick your neck out, it's not easy. But once you actually stand up, you do get noticed. http://www.plcsimulator.org/

The numbers seem more like when we were learning COBOL... :)

IIRC, K&R said one of their goals for the language design for C was to keep the language constructs close to the machine architecture they were targetting. The motivation for that wasn't so much to make the compiler easier, but to make the code that language users wrote close to the native instruction set. I think the goal was to let the application developer optimize his code, rather than rely on the compiler to do it. Some of the FORTRAN compilers of that era were exploring optimization, and you ended up coding things in a particular way in order to force a given behavior out of the compiler. My comment was really based on my experience with Ada. Ada was designed by a bunch of academics with little or no experience in practical software development. These people were largely university researchers in compiler design. In the end, they created a language that was difficult to write, often problematic to compile successfully, and failed to serve its target audience (the U.S. Department of Defense). Software Zen: delete this; // [Fold With Us!](http://www.codeproject.com/script/profile/whos_who.asp?msg=1307432&id=10338#xx1307432xx)[[^](http://www.codeproject.com/script/profile/whos_who.asp?msg=1307432&id=10338#xx1307432xx "New Window")]

Well the compiler will still do some optimising. The real problem probably lays in how it is inlining the code. I do not have the 7.0 compiler, but it would be interesting to see if it would choke on (2 & flag) with your code. I suspect that it would see that and produce the correct inline code instead of what ever it was producing. The only real way to see what it is doing is to look at the asymbly code, before and after modifying the code. :laugh:No I do not believe it would turn 2 to 0, every place that 2 is in your code is unique to that piece of code, so subsequent statements where 2 is applied is unique. 2 is a true constant where the variable i was a temporay constant with a specific address location. INTP "The more help VB provides VB programmers, the more miserable your life as a C++ programmer becomes." Andrew W. Troelsen