Effectiveness of an optimizing compiler for arithmetic expressions
James A. Painter · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1970
This paper defines the notion of effectiveness of an optimizing compiler and presents a proof that a simple optimizing compiler is effective. An optimizing compiler typically consists of a basic compiler and a set of optimizations for special cases. The fundamental notion of effectiveness is that the basic compiler is correct, all of the optimization transformations preserve correctness, and produce essentially equivalent programs which have a smaller value relative to a specified weighting function.