If the suggestions were taken into account and $* adjusted, then it would make sense for Khaled to fix that bug too, if it's not too difficult.
The way I see it is that at the moment $* works differently to any other identifier. Fixing it so that it works like every other identifier can only be a good thing, surely?
Also, not to nitpick, but your test is still slightly flawed in that $* loops from 1 to 1,000, but your loop test goes backwards.. to make the test completely fair, you would need to do this in /loopsub:
alias loopsub {
var %i = 1
while (%i <= $0) {
noop $calc( [ $+($,%i) ] *3)
inc %i
}
}
That adds an extra second to the processing time of the code on my machine:
/dec method:
$*: 3188 ms.
Loop: 5359 ms.
Control: 281 ms.
/inc method:
$*: 3188 ms.
Loop: 6110 ms.
Control: 281 ms.
/inc method:
$*: 3203 ms.
Loop: 6094 ms.
Control: 281 ms.