Languages that give "hints" to the compiler

I remember a post in the last year or two that mentioned in passing some
early FORTRAN compilers that allowed hints to be passed on to the
compiler; for example, the likelihood of a branch being taken. The goal
is to allow better optimization by supplying better info to the compiler.
I couldn't track down the post, and was wondering if anyone might have
some refs to work in this area? I'm interested in approaches for allowing
the programmer to supply optimization information to the compiler.


Today, the usual approaches seem to be:
        - comment statements
        - #pragma
        - command-line compiler options/switches
What other approaches have languages or compilers supported?


Thanks for any information you might be able to share. I'll post a
summary if people are interested. Cheers,


    - joe
--
Joe Hummel
ICS Graduate Student, UC Irvine
Internet: jhummel@ics.uci.edu
[The original FORTRAN compiler had a FREQUENCY statement that let you give
a hint to the compiler how many times a DO loop would run or which was the
most likely branch of an IF. It disappeared in Fortran II. Legend says
that the final nail in its coffin was when someone found that it was
implemented backwards and nobody had noticed. -John]
--

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.