I'm not sure what you you mean. A table lookup would be about as fast in Pascal as in assembler, but that is because it is a micro-operation where not much freedom exists to do things in different ways, which also means there is too little flexibility to do assembler wizardry.

However, for many calculations there are generally enough things assembler coders can do to obtains superior results.

Any comparison, be it less than, greater than, equal or whatever translates to the cmp instruction, which evaluates in one cycle, so is extemely cheap. Because some instructions already set the flags, the cmp is not always necessary and the comparison is even free (the jump after it might still be expensive depending on correct branch prediction). For example:

Code:
if a=2                 {This one requires a cmp register,2}
if a and $f<>0     &#123;This one does not require a cmp, and therefore is free.&#125;