BAL paper available

Conal Elliott conal@microsoft.com
Tue, 15 May 2001 13:44:03 -0700


Small comment.  Marcin wrote:

> About program transformation possibility: I don't see how it would
> be applied in practice. There is no use of associativity of (+) for
> the compiler. It can do many optimizations, but it won't rewrite
> x+(y+z) to (x+y)+z nor vice versa.

Associativity and commutativity (AC) are not optimizations in
themselves, but rather enable optimizations if you have an AC matcher in
your rewriting system (as, for instance, in Mathematica).

	- Conal