Many instructions of machine code can be written as one C statement. There are some cases of things the cpu can do that are not standardized in C, like "arithmetic shift vs. logical shift." Maybe these instructions would be inlined.

> Many instructions of machine code can be written as one C statement.

I'm quite aware =) Nested loops, some pointer calculations (dealing with real mode pointers), conditionals with more than one condition, and multi-step math statements seem particularly verbose, compared to their higher-level equivalents. If a piece of code gets kind of complicated, I usually hand-decompile it, and it's usually much shorter, even in fairly-naive C code.