[Arryn]

A cogent, well-stated reply, Peter. The quote by K&R was what I tried to allude to in an earlier posting.

BTW, it's not so much that the opitimizer may be "bad" than that it may be using "overly aggressive" choices. I remember the Borland compiler dev team in the early 90s having many headaches over just how far they should go. In those days, Borland and MS kept trying to out-do each other via how powerful their optimizations were. After a few cycles of this we started seeing cases of too much optimization.

A careful review of what all the default optimization switches do should be undertaken by anyone that's serious about code-writing, especially cross-platform code, to avoid potential pitfalls. Hell, one should also look at the linker's switches too.