Optimization

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil" once said Knuth
(allegedly in "Structured Programming with goto Statements").
It is, and I know I am evil.
Ideally, we should build a sufficiently smart compiler,
that would do all the evil stuff on our behalf,
thus taking all our sins upon itself.

I started a page on the TunesWiki about OptimizationStrategies.
	http://www2.tunes.org/cgi-bin/TunesWiki?browse=OptimizationStrategies
Currently, it's more of a collection of wild ramblings,
but eventually, it could be refactored into a starting point toward
many things, like a list of optimization patterns,
ideas for the design of an optimizing compiler,
pointers to existing techniques and corresponding papers and software,
various sources of insight (quotes by masters like Perlis, Knuth...),
etc.

PS: AP5.com is an interesting project that does automatic optimization
of data representation.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
Imagine algebra in XML: instead of (sin (+ x y)), sin(x+y) or x y + sin,
you get <sin><plus><var name=x><separator><var name=y></plus></sin>.