Impact of code difference in Collection#contains() worth improving?

[Guy Steele]

On Aug 29, 2014, at 7:33 PM, John Rose <john.r.rose at oracle.com> wrote:
> . . .
> Changing source code on based on the difference between 0 and -1 is almost as pointless as removing whitespace and comments . . .

Well said, John!  But I cannot resist recalling that one of the earliest pieces of software in the implementation of EMACS (back when the implementation language was TECO, a text-editing language) was a routine that, when it loaded TECO macros from a file, would carefully remove comments and excess whitespace in order to improve the execution speed of the macros (and therefore the response time of the EMACS keystrokes)!  We have come a long, long way in 38 years.

--Guy