Computers are fast
Pretty naïve, I'm surprised to see it here. Not that this is pointless study, but it's pretty easy to guess up these numbers if you know about how long it takes to use a register, L1, L2, RAM, hard drive (and you should). And exactly how long it would take is task-specific question, because depends more on what optimization techniques can be used for the task and what cannot, so unless you are interested specifically in summation mod 256, this information isn't much of use, as "processing" is much broader than "adding moulo 256".<p>But it's nice that somewhere somebody else understood, that <i>computers are fast</i>. Seriously, no irony here. Because it's about time for people to realize, what disastrous world modern computing is. I mean, your home PC processes gigabytes of data in the matter of seconds, amount of computations (relative to its cost) it is capable of would drive some scientist 60 years ago crazy and it gets <i>wasted</i>. It's year 2014 and you <i>have to</i> wait for your computer. It's so much faster than you, but you are waiting for it! What an irony! You don't even want to add up gigabyte of numbers, you want to close a tab in your browser or whatever, and there are quite a few processes running in the background that actually have to be running right now to do something useful, unfortunately OS doesn't know about that. Unneeded data cached in the RAM and you wait while OS fetches memory page from HDD. But, well, after 20 layers of abstraction it's pretty hard to do only useful computations, so you make your user wait to finish some computationally simple stuff.<p>About every time I write code I feel guilty.