Annotation for unfolding wanted

[Claus Reinke]

>Some compilers unroll recursive functions by inlining them N times, for some fixed N (say 3 or so). 
>This reduces the loop overheads.  GHC doesn't do this, although it'd be nice, because it makes 
>repeated traversals of the code, and it's hard to spot when the function has been unrolled 3 times 
>and then stop.  If you look at the code after unrolling 3 times, from scratch, there's another call 
>just waiting to be inlined.

couldn't the number of unfoldings be encoded in the name of the function?

    f x = if p x then x else f (g x)

    f x = if p x then x else let x' = (g x) in if p x' then x' else f#1 (g x')

where f#1 would be f for all other purposes, but with one unfolding used up,
and N being the bound for the f#i.

claus