Re: Q: access to subprogram

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Jon said

"At the risk of starting another branch in this goofy thread, you are
quite correct here in that to some extent this aspect of the
discussion has been a case of "arguing in a vacuum.  I suppose at this
point Jay Martin would start blow torching academics for this, but it
is curious that this sort of thing is not given much attention despite
the fact that it does have real world impact and would appear to be
very important."

Actually this data DOES exist, but it tends to be proprietary. For example,
IBM has *extensive* PL/1 execution traces that would certainly yield this
information for a large set of existing PL/1 applications. Similarly you
will find that Ada companies have this kind of informatoin available, but
do not necessarily share it.

I would not blow torch academics here. The trouble is that to get this
information, you need widespread acccess to large real-world applications.
Such access is usually only available to large companies, and not to
universities, and measuremens on small non-typical programs may be
worse than useless.