The Generation of Optimal Code for Arithmetic Expressions

  • Authors:

  • Ravi Sethi;J. D. Ullman

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. and Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., Murray Hill, New Jersey;Department of Electrical Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J. and Bell Telephone Laboratories, Inc., Murray Hill, New Jersey

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 1970

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Abstract

The problem of evaluating arithmetic expressions on a machine with N ≥ 1 general purpose registers is considered. It is initially assumed that no algebraic laws apply to the operators and operands in the expression. An algorithm for evaluation of expressions under this assumption is proposed, and it is shown to take the shortest possible number of instructions. It is then assumed that certain operators are commutative or both commutative and associative. In this case a procedure is given for finding an expression equivalent to a given one and having the shortest possible evaluation sequence. It is then shown that the algorithms presented here also minimize the number of storage references in the evaluation.