RFC 302 (v1) Unrolling loops and tail recursion

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=head1 TITLE

Unrolling loops and tail recursion

=head1 VERSION

  Maintainer: Simon Cozens <[email protected]>
  Date: 25 Sep 2000
  Mailing List: [email protected]
  Number: 302
  Version: 1
  Status: Developing

=head1 ABSTRACT

Implement loop unrolling and tail recursion elimination as optional
optimisations.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Tail recursion elimination is something which has been on the todo for a
long time, but I think nobody's done it because it's really really hard.
I'd suggest

    use optimize 'recursion';

would be a natural syntax, if C<less> turns into C<optimize>.

Unrolling of loops is something that becomes important for compiling to
standalone executables; I think

    use optimize 'unroll-loops';

would be the way to signify that. If we have a standalone compiler, I'd
suggest the cc-style C<-f...> command-line options.

=head1 IMPLEMENTATION

I have no idea how to implement tail recursion elimination, and I'd
dearly love to learn. Unrolling loops with constant indices shouldn't be
too hard.

=head1 REFERENCES

RFC 303: Keep C<use less>, but make it work.