Effectiveness of compilers today

I suppose this has been up to discussion here for a couple of times, and
if it is a faq, please forgive me (though it sounds unlikely).


Many years ago I heard for the first time the statement that compilers
generated more efficient code than many assembler programmers did. And
that is what I took it for, a statement. Doing some tests between me and
Borland C showed that borland was quite a bit better than me. Even though
I havn't done any assembler codeing for over a year now, I found it
supprising that it should beat me with so much.


Could someone tell me more about this. Are there any tests between common
compilers and assembler programmers. Who is the best?


Arff


PS. The test wasn't scientific at all, and the code wasn't very large :-)
  Just curious...
[This has indeed been discussed to death in the past. My impression is that
for a small chunk of code, a human can almost always meet or beat a compiler,
but for large chunks people aren't as persistent as compilers at optimizing
assember code. Reports of concrete experience are welcomed, messages along
the lines of "I don't believe any compiler can code as well as I do"
cheerfully discarded. -John]
--

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