I know some PC programmers who habitually use "short" everywhere
instead of "int" when they really don't care, and it costs.
One time I was working on an inner loop, which I had hand-coded
in assembly to get maximum speed out of it. Then I looked at the
overhead of the next loop out. (Basically, I compared the timing
of 10 inner loops of 1000 iterations each with 1000 inner loops
of 10 iterations each. The difference is 990x the overhead per
outer loop iteration.)
Changing one variable from "short" to "int" made a noticeable
difference.
-- -Colin