Abstract :
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 studies3,9and have been used commercially to design efficient pseudo machines for the Burroughs B1700.10,12
