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From: dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)
Subject: Re: seperate keyword and seperate compilation with Gnat?
Date: 1996/07/09
Message-ID: <dewar.836941584@schonberg>#1/1
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references: <dewar.836427220@schonberg> <4rrcal$hhh@newsbf02.news.aol.com>
 <DuA43q.CtC@world.std.com>
organization: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences
newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1996-07-09T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


Bob Duff said

"I was against the inclusion of pragma Discard_Names, though -- I thought
compilers ought to be able to do that optimization without the extra
hint, and I didn't think this particular feature was worth the trouble.
On the other hand, I was in favor of pragma Restrictions."

That's misguided in my opinion. This is in fact a rather hard optimization.
FIrst it is not a compiler optimization, but a linker optimization, and
the trouble is that many modern linker tools, including nearly all Unix
linkers, are not well setup for eliminating unused code, let alone 
unreferenced data. You definitely would NOT get this optimization happening
on most implementations.