Static and Dynamic Characteristics of XPL Programs

One use of performance measurement techniques is in the study of operational characteristics of programs written in high-level programming languages. Information derived from such studies can be used to construct benchmark programs and synthetic workloads,^1,2detect inefficiencies in programming language implementation, and suggest possible improvements in the design of computers.^3,9,10Our main interest is in the latter area: the discovery of primitive operations, implied by the semantics of a programming language, that can be added to the firmware or hardware of a computer to improve overall system performance. These computer architecture optimization techniques have been applied in several studies^3,9and have been used commercially to design efficient pseudo machines for the Burroughs B1700.^10,12