256 Bit Arithmetic

All this fun fiddling around to do what is, on the surface, "simple" math brought back happy memories of reading about the "Carmack" approach of doing inverse square roots in C: http://betterexplained.com/articles/understanding-quakes-fas... as found at Hacker News about 18 months ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=419166

Any reason not to help gcc generate the good code by default?

I got to admit, even though it was interesting enough, the captcha was more interesting to 'decode'.