Article here:
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/18/0146216
"When C was created, it was very fast because it was almost trivial to turn
C code into equivalent machine code. But this was only a short-term benefit;
in the 30 years since C was created, processors have changed a lot. The task
of mapping C code to a modern microprocessor has gradually become
increasingly difficult. Since a lot of legacy C code is still around,
however, a huge amount of research effort (and money) has been applied to
the problem, so we still can get good performance from the language."
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Not a pedant
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