What is hand-coded assembly language used for these days?
scumola: I've re-written many perl things in C to speed up processing time - for me, it's better than buying more/newer hardware.  Also, for smallish scripts that I invoke millions of times or a small perl script that does regexps, I can rewrite those in C to boost speed as well.  I don't do any ASM code anymore, but C is a really good optimization step for me and my projects.