This and other RFCs are available on the web at
http://dev.perl.org/rfc/
=head1 TITLE
Unrolling loops and tail recursion
=head1 VERSION
Maintainer: Simon Cozens <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 25 Sep 2000
Mailing List: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Number: 302
Version: 1
Status: Developing
=head1 ABSTRACT
Implement loop unrolling and tail recursion elimination as optional
optimisations.
=head1 DESCRIPTION
Tail recursion elimination is something which has been on the todo for a
long time, but I think nobody's done it because it's really really hard.
I'd suggest
use optimize 'recursion';
would be a natural syntax, if C<less> turns into C<optimize>.
Unrolling of loops is something that becomes important for compiling to
standalone executables; I think
use optimize 'unroll-loops';
would be the way to signify that. If we have a standalone compiler, I'd
suggest the cc-style C<-f...> command-line options.
=head1 IMPLEMENTATION
I have no idea how to implement tail recursion elimination, and I'd
dearly love to learn. Unrolling loops with constant indices shouldn't be
too hard.
=head1 REFERENCES
RFC 303: Keep C<use less>, but make it work.
