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By the end of the first invocation of <code>strcat()</code> the length of <code>buffer</code> will known but not preserved upon return to the point just after step 1 and just before step 2. Subsequent calls to <code>strcat()</code> have to compute that length again before they concatenating another name to the <code>buffer</code>.
As such, and analogous to Schmiel's not carrying the paint-bucket with him, all the subsequent <code>strcat()</code>s have to again "walk" the length of the string to determine where the second string should be copied. As more data is added to it, the string in <code>buffer</code> also gets longer with each call to <code>strcat()</code>, and with increasing length, the determination of that length takes longer, which means that subsequent calls are increasingly slower. Just as "
The problems illustrated by Spolsky's example remain hidden to a programmer with little or no knowledge of the underlying principles and functions, which every higher-level language and library will still be using even when the low-level manipulation is not immediately obvious at the higher level. "Some of the biggest mistakes people make even at the highest architectural levels come from having a weak or broken understanding of a few simple things at the very lowest levels."<ref name="basics" />
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