>You would be better off spending your time on those than on the standard library functions.
It seems like everyone is hell bent on doing things the hard way though. With any luck, rsnd will walk away remembering at least our advice on analyzing performance. A wise programmer profiles her code and optimizes where optimizations can do the most good. But I've said it before and I'm sure I'll say it again: Wisdom comes from doing silly things so many times that you finally understand why they're silly.
