A method for the time analysis of programs
S. L. de Freitas, P. J. Lavelle · IBM Systems Journal · 1978
The research discussed in this paper can be seen as serving a number of different needs, some of which are the following: • It provides a tool for day-to-day programming. • It provides a feasibility study of the value of including timinganalysis facilities in production compilers. • For a given language, timing analysis gives a comparison of the efficiencies of various compilers. • For a given machine, timing analysis gives a comparison of the efficiencies of different languages. • For a given problem, timing analysis can be a useful performancekost analysis tool for various sets of languages, compilers, and machines. • Timing analysis gives feedback for machine and compiler design. We think that a lot of work is still to be done in this avenue of applied research. The method described in this paper can also be applied to programs written in other high-level languages, such as COBOL and PL~I. The authors believe that the type of analysis described here can also be made available as a compiler option, thus making timing analyses faster and cheaper to obtain. With additional effort, such an analysis could also detect and flag improper boundary alignment, which often reduces efficiency in System/370.