Let me say I love this question! I was an Assembly language officianado back in the day for my company, and there was nothing I loved more than tweaking ASM code down to a gnats ass in size and speed in light years (relative to the 80's and 90's). This would be great question for a college level C or Assembly Language class to explore. The idea that you can look at the actual code generated by the compiler has always been a fantastic tool for learning the voodoo these compiler writers create. These compilers are also the reason us old Assembly language coders are out of business - nowadays there is no time to tweak so much before getting your product out the door. Let there be no doubt, this kind of optimization is fun stuff! The mention of Michael Abrash brought back my old memories, and the mindset he inspired in order to dissect ASM code still works today in higher level languages. Kudos for this question and the example code used to test it.