title: Complicated code for obvious operations
body: <p>Sometimes, mainly for optimization purposes, very simple operations are implemented as complicated and clumsy code.</p>
  
  <p>One example is this integer initialization function:</p>
  
  <pre><code>void assign( int* arg )
  {
      __asm__ __volatile__ ( "mov %%eax, %0" : "=m" (*arg));
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Then:</p>
  
  <pre><code>int a;
  assign ( &amp;a );
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But actually I don't understand why is it written in this way...</p>
  
  <p>Have you seen any example with real reasons to do so?</p>