> or something similar), or else a floating-point load/add/store sequence.
> I can also expect that "woozle++" and "++woozle" will produce the same
> code on a decent compiler.  In C++, however, none of those assumptions
> hold.  Whereas I could put a reasonable upper bound on the time required
> for "woozle++" in C, it may well be in C++ that woozle is a complex heap-
> allocated structure and that incrementing it could require doing a gar-
> bage collection on a 16MB heap.

Right... but only if woozle refers to a class, for which the ++
operator has been overloaded - which is something the user would have
done deliberately anyway. The only difference is that, for convenience,
it's written woozle++, and not WoozleIncrement(), as it would be in C.

The only time you won't know exactly what woozle++ is doing is if
you're using someone else's classes, and you don't have the source -
a problem that you would still run into with function calls in C.

C++ is really just a convenient notation for providing objects in C.
In terms of the code-generation side of things, the compilers are
pretty much identical!

Cheers,

Ben