[gclist] Length of dependency chains

[Eric Jeschke]

| On Apr 17,  9:29am, Jerry Leichter wrote:
|
| This brings up an interesting point:  Just how long *are* typical dependency
| chains?  That is:  What is the expected length of the shortest path from a
| root
| to a live element?  I suspect that, for most programming styles, not only is
| the
| expected value quite small, but that the distribution is heavily skewed
| toward
| small values, with outliers being quite rare.
|

For a non-strict language these dependency chains can get quite large,
especially if the task granularity is small.  However, I suspect most
of the people on this list are not dealing with lazy languages.

-- 
Eric Jeschke                      |       Visiting Research Associate
jeschke@cs.indiana.edu            |          Indiana University   
                                  |       Computer Science Department
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/jeschke