[v3] conditional tweak

[Jerry Quinn]

Gabriel Dos Reis writes:
 > Phil Edwards <phil@codesourcery.com> writes:
 > 
 > | Here's my opinion before I vanish into non-networked-land for a few days:
 > | for years, the GCC team has been warning of the dangers of slowing down the
 > | compiler and runtime by a few percent at a time, because it accumulates
 > | so quickly.
 > 
 > I'm just asking for an actual data. Can we have one?
 > 
 > -- Gaby

I didn't actually see any difference on an AMD XP2100, but the only
other platform I can really test is a mobile P4.

I submitted the patch on the theory that this is a frequently called
function in output numbers and this should potentially allow for
improvements on machines that can benefit.  The only thought I had
against it was that machines usually predict against forward branches,
in which case, they are already biased away from the initialization
code.

Jerry