[phkahler]

I find the headline very interesting. It's very inviting because of the way it expresses a sort of epiphany about doing it wrong on a mundane programming task. One is tempted to read it in order to see if there is some great insight to this problem. just maybe it's applicable outside this one problem. It begs the question: if he's been doing it wrong on a fairly mundane thing, maybe I am too. I need to see what this is about.

[buzzybee]

I believe it's very common to find little variations on algorithms or coding style like this that could produce a nice gain in efficiency or elegance. They aren't really the same problem as whole-system engineering, though, since most of your bottlenecks come from the algorithm that is completely unsuitable, not the one that is a little bit suboptimal.