Removing trivial assignments from programs
Bernard Mont-Reynaud · Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) · 1976
An assignment Y to X in a program is 'trivial' when both X and Y are simple program variables. The paper describes a transformation which removes all such assignments from a program P, producing a program P' which executes faster than P but usually has a larger size. The number of variables used by P' is also minimized. Worst-case analysis of the transformation algorithm leads to nonpolynomial bounds. Such inefficiency, however, does not arise in typical situations, and the technique appears to be of interest for practical compiler optimization.