[DonRotolo]

OK, thanks for the details. Different from what I was thinking, and so very helpful.

The reason for the question is to help my programmers generate more efficient code. As everyone knows, there's more than one way to skin a cat in software, and so some careful choices can bring us faster execution. This isn't a really significant concern - not yet, at least - because we're nowheres near the liit of code space or CPU cycles in the loop. But, with some of the things being planned, we may come close to one, the other, or both - and I want to be prepared when we do.

Part of this whole exercise is to let kids understand what 'efficient code' means. Again, coming out of the punch card era, where a 1 MHz processor and 100 MB of online disk were very large mainframe characteristics, today's bloated software, while nifty, is misleading. I showed a kid a copy of TinyEd, a work processor for DOS that's something like 6k of .EXE. He didn't believe it, how could a word processor be only 6k big? Compare that to MS Word.

Thanks again, I have enough information and references to move forward on my own.

Don