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[QUOTE="Roedy Green, post: 628488"]
Early my career I worked on number crunching programs for the local
electric utility that took many hours to compete. The game was looking
for yet another way to speed them up.  I would look at the assembler
generated by IBM's Fortran H  and PL/1 compilers to see what sort of
optimisations they would make.  So often they would miss "obvious"
ones.  Then you have to imagine being the compiler without the extra
knowledge you have about what pathological things could happen, and
allow yourself to get paranoid. Then you discover the most innocent
little things could inhibit an optimisation.

Java is nicely designed from an optimising compiler's point of view,
but still I think that general observation would still apply.  If you
can keep code simple and non-intertwined, the optimising compiler will
be able to do more with it.

But even more important, keeping variables as local as possible is a
great boon to the maintenance programmer. It allows him to IGNORE
hunks of code.
[/QUOTE]

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