Optimizing C++ vector expressions

All this was pretty complicated, so a fair question to ask is, “Is this worth it?” The answer is: “Worth it to whom?” Every programming language has a gimmick. The gimmick of C++ is to put as much intelligence in the class libraries as possible, to make things as easy as possible for the users of those classes. In spite of the fact that there's a lot of complexity in the implementation of vector arithmetic, any user of the Vector class doesn’t see that complexity. They can create Vectors and perform arithmetic on them with ease and with confidence that the best possible code will be generated. That's the classical trade-off in C++: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. © 2000, IEEE. All rights reserved.