🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1608@vaxnix.tandy.COM> ron@vaxnix.UUCP (Ron Light) writes:
>In article <9773@bigtex.cactus.org> james@bigtex.cactus.org (James Van Artsdalen) writes:
>If I have a delay loop, for whatever reason, I would be very
>angry if the compiler decided, for itself, "Oh, this is stupid, we don't
>need this."

The compiler doesn't know it is a "delay loop."  It only knows that it
is an empty loop.  It might have resulted from code like:

	for (i=0; i<100; ++i) {
	    assert(a[i] != 0);
	}

when compiled with NDEBUG=1

>A compiler's job is [...]to take the source code I've
>given it and try to produce the most reasonable approximation of assembly
>or binary code.

Perhaps, but the job of an *optimizing*compiler* is to produce the
fastest/smallest code sequence it can, out of the set of possible code
sequences which perform the same function.

Jeff Siegal