Quote Originally Posted by krtxmrtz
I find this quite surprising not to say hard to believe. If c is so efficient at string parsing you'd only have to take the compiled c code and convert it to assembler, on the basis that each machine instruction corresponds to an actual assembler instruction...
If you take a string parsing routine written in C, say a for loop using integer offsets to the base address of the string (array of bytes), and then decompile it to assembler, you will get about a 1-1 ratio of C code to assembler code. In other words, you may not get 1-line to 1-line correspondence, but you would not be able to reduce the assembler any further. C can be extremely close to assembler in terms of efficiency.