The "optimizations" that compilers use are certainly interesting in the sense
that there are things to be learned from them.
They do, however, have two limitations. They are particularist, appropriate
usually but not always to the run-time environment in which a particular
compiler's output will be executed but often less so in a different
environment. (Both advantages and disadvantages have, for example, attended
the use of shared optimizing machinery by IBM PL/I and C.)
These optimizations are also devised by groups whose full-time job is to
optimize code skeletons that are used stereotypically in compiler-generated
code; and these groups inevitably come to have a vested interest in cleverness,
i.e., non-standard, less than obvious ways of doing things.
I have been dismayed by this thread. It would be better for almost all of us
almost all of the time to use MVCLs, devoting the time not wasted by examining
clever alternatives to them to more significant problems.
John Gilmore Ashland, MA 01721-1817 USA
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