Thread View: mod.computers.pyramid
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Started by boyle
Thu, 12 Mar 1987 15:29
Re: problem with the interpretation of certain constants
Author: boyle
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1987 15:29
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1987 15:29
25 lines
1886 bytes
1886 bytes
This is an interesting bug for me. It appears to be a classic example of scheduling the optimization (of removing multiplication by 1.0) too late in the derivation of the object program, after multiplications by 1.0 have been converted to a form is which they are no longer easily identifiable. This seems to be a general property of optimizations--"to everything there is a season". They cannot be done too soon, because the opportunity to apply them may not exist, and they should not be done too late, because they may be much harder to detect than when done at the best time, or (as in this case), other cases that shouldn't be optimized may have been commoned with them. I would suggest doing this optimization near the source code level. Doing it at the object code level is likely to leave behind a lot to clean up--nonoptimal register allocation, etc. Consider the results for the expression (a*1.0 - b*c), for example; after the multiplication by 1.0 is removed, a register (unneed on some machine architectures) might still be used to hold a. I discuss this point briefly in a paper "Program Reusability through Program Transformation" (hey, what can I say?) in the Sept. 84 IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Jim Boyle
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