I'd like to repose your question, but with a broader scope to encompass a lot of the discussion that's taken place on this thread and a spin on it for some perspective:

Let's have a look at The Win32 Shootout so we have a reference point. My version of the question would be: Is there a relationship between readability & performance? (Be it negative or otherwise)

I ask the question because I think it's fair - if you have to trade readability for anything then performance should be on the top of the list.

I'll start by saying that it's a very difficult thing to measure because 'readability' is subjective. We all have our own experiences & to some people sweetened/verbose code is more familiar while to others it clutters up the algorthyms and makes it harder to see the Big Picture.

But even so, is there a trend? It might seem intuitive that the most cryptic optimizations are usually those that perform best, but is it actually so?

I realize that performance isn't the key quality that we're measuring here. But in my experiece there's a negative relationship between compatability & efficiency (the classic example is XML vs. binary data) and so I'm wondering if there's a relationship to readability. Any thoughts? I mean fundamentally there's a reason why we all don't write in assembler, right?