  low level C functions such as <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">atof</span></code>,
          <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">strtod</span></code>, <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">atol</span></code>,
          <code class="computeroutput"><span class="identifier">strtol</span></code>. Benchmarks reveal
          up to 4X speed over the C counterparts. This goes to show that you can
          write extremely tight generic C++ code that rivals,