Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: low level optimization
Message-ID: <1991Apr17.225944.15261@zoo.toronto.edu>
Date: Wed, 17 Apr 1991 22:59:44 GMT
References: <andand.671719926@cia.docs.uu.se> <15828@smoke.brl.mil> <21527@lanl.gov> <15870@smoke.brl.mil> <21660@lanl.gov>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology

In article <21660@lanl.gov> jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>... The only
>way around this difficulty is interprocedural analysis - but C requires
>separate compilation. 

And the top traffic light has to be red - but blueberries are blue.  The
two parts of that statement have about as much to do with each other as
in yours.  There is no shortage of standard-conforming C compilers that
do vigorous interprocedural analysis if asked to; the ones from MIPS,
for example.  Even actual separate compilation does not actually preclude
interprocedural analysis, although it certainly makes it harder.  But the
problem at hand is nowhere near that hard, since you can simply decline
to provide both capabilities simultaneously.  You do interprocedural
analysis across all source files supplied to a single invocation of the
compiler, and if the user is supplying some modules as object files,
the interprocedural analysis simply doesn't extend over their boundaries.
-- 
And the bean-counter replied,           | Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
"beans are more important".             |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu  utzoo!henry