It is not an issue of writting the most efficient and shortest code possible, it is an issue of getting your job done and to maintain it for future updates and bug fixes easily.

With my sincerest apologies to the brothers Grimm:

Once upon a time in a land far away there was a programmer that insisted on using C as his language. That programmer was asked to come to the house of a toymaker that made dancing nutcrackers. The toymakeer said "if you make my nutcracker dance the waltz we will find a pot of gold". The programmer, in his infinite wisdom, made the mechanism for making the nutcracker dance the waltz in C and showed it to the toymaker. In his delight the toymaker cried out "we will make millions of children happy". Then the toymaker realized that the nutcracker could not quite keep up the tempo of the merry widow waltz and said to the programmer "what do we do". The programmer replied "no problem, we use a faster chip". The toymaker said "you already asked for more memory, now you want a faster chip, the nutcracker is ging to be so expensive that only rich kids can have it and in that case we will not sell enough to find the pot of gold". Then he heard a cry in the street "rejected old fashioned assembler programmer will work for food". Being a man of good heart, the toymaker went out and said "if you sweep my floor, I will feed you". The assembler guy started sweeping the floor, spotted the nutcracker dancing on the table and said "that is a nice toy, I am sure it will make a lot of kids very happy". The toymaker replied "that was what I wanted, but now, with more memory and a faster chip, only rich kids can afford it".
The assembler programmer said "I may have some ideas, may I have a look". The toymaker thought: what can he do, but all is lost anyhow, so why not. The assembler programmer quickly redid some critical routines, discarded the extra memory and installed a cheap slow uC. The toymaker said wonderful, now we can make ALL the kids in the world happy and we will find the pot of gold. The C programmer went on to do low volume applications, the assembler programmer stayed with the toymaker And they all lived happily ever after.

Erik