Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!hao!gatech!purdue!i.cc.purdue.edu!j.cc.purdue.edu!pur-ee!uiucdcs!uxc.cso.uiuc.edu!ccvaxa!aglew
From: aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: taken -vs- untaken branches, Fo
Message-ID: <28200086@ccvaxa>
Date: 12 Jan 88 16:27:00 GMT
References: <839@ima.ISC.COM>
Lines: 46
Nf-ID: #R:ima.ISC.COM:839:ccvaxa:28200086:000:2148
Nf-From: ccvaxa.UUCP!aglew    Jan 12 10:27:00 1988


>>[Me]
>>I would rather that you had said "the system should be able to",
>>but "the programmer can if he really wants to".
>
>>First, a high level directive like FREQUENCY can be generated either
>>by the programmer or automatically by the language system, so why not
>>make this functionality available to the programmer?
>
>[John Mashey]
>I suppose it would be OK to have FREQUENCY statements or similar
>directives, although the code clutter might be awful.   In my opinion,
>if much of this idea depends on human beings putting them in,
>it's a *********Wrong Thing**************


I'm maximally in favour of compilers that do their own frequency analyses.
I would just like something that I can use in the meantime.
And it seems to me that the FREQUENCY statement provides a decent
interface for both human and automatically specified systems.

Several people have said things like "programmer's intuition is frequently
wrong". Agreed. But what about formal, mathematical, analyses?

Why do I always get into this fight with Computer Scientists?
They say "well, if you do it right then you wouldn't need to specify things
by hand. It'll all be done automatically." 
    Sheesh! Eventually *ALL* programming will be done automatically. But
in the meantime, give me the tools I need to get the job done.

If your language system lets you use automatically collected 
profiles to direct code generation, but not FREQUENCY statements in the code,
then I know that one day I am going to have to edit the "automatically
collected profiles" by hand. And keeping those up to date with changing code
will be a nightmare.


Andy "Krazy" Glew. Gould CSD-Urbana.    1101 E. University, Urbana, IL 61801   
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My opinions are my own, and are not the opinions of my employer, or any
other organisation. I indicate my company only so that the reader may
account for any possible bias I may have towards our products.