Re: Constant folding
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- Subject: Re: Constant folding
- From: Kein-Hong Man <mkh@...>
- Date: 2006年3月15日 12:51:03 +0800
Mike Pall wrote:
Kein-Hong Man wrote:
It is not heavy-duty constant folding, though. According to my
observations, the terms of an expression are not reordered, so the
following is not optimized:
local a = a+1+2
since it is parsed as:
local a = (a+1)+2
It would violate the language semantics to optimize this at
compile time. '+' is left-associative in Lua. If 'a' is a table
or userdata with an __add metamethod, it could completely change
the execution path when the terms are reordered or folded.
It even makes a difference with numbers (lua_Number = double):
$ lua -e 'local x=2^53; print((x+1+1)-x, (x+2)-x)'
0 2
Addition is only associative in specific (mathematical) groups.
E.g. for numbers with arbitrary precision or fixed precision
integers with wrap-around semantics. Floating-point numbers with
a fixed precision do not follow this rule (and many others).
Compiler writers sometimes forget about this (hint: check your
favourite language). But Lua gets it right.
Good call. Thanks for the explanation, I was thinking in terms of
integers. There is of course always a danger with shortcuts when
dealing with floating-point formats. I've been applying C thinking
to this thing... :-) Semantically, of course it is wrong. But in
the real world, the user usually wants 1+2 optimized.
I guess the best way is to make it explicit, i.e. write:
local a = a+1+2
as:
local a = a+(1+2)
--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia