Ninth before January and February were added, yeah.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar , if it's of any real interest - although it didn't have anything to do with the roman emperors for whom July and August are named, which is what I assumed. I knew two were added, just not which two. Ah well, I suppose that'll just serve as a reminder to actually check things before saying them, from time to time
Huh. Could've sworn it was July and August that were the new ones.
Also, on the subject of optimization: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” —
Donald Knuth (ie. working code first, optimization later)
[snip]...and proving their assembler-based library is several times faster, but I don't really know how they get that good at that sort of programming
It's not too difficult once you start. The worst part is how much more verbose you have to be about the simplest things, and that's not too bad. (Admittedly I've only ever worked with "small" assembly languages, such as 6502 and whatever chip's in my Arduino Uno. I'm not quite desperate enough yet to get into x86_64
)
Think of it like embarking in an evil biome instead of a more sane one: death is swifter and more horrendous, but the essentials of fortressing remain. Death is a program crashing and fortressing is programming. Writing assembler in as few instructions or clock cycles as possible is subjecting yourself to some great self-imposed challenge
while in a terrifying biome. And in either situation, having a working fortress or program is way more rewarding when it's done in a terrifying biome during a bare-bones challenge than when you've done it in the most benign of biomes having started the journey well-stocked.