The Optimization of Programming Languages

The library would then it would read that description and at compile time, it would produce code that was just always a single while loop operating on the list. The very specific thing is a nonsense program, but what you're describing is a very real way of constructing programs. And I think this highlights a thing that comes up in a lot of the different design work you've been involved with - there are two ways of thinking about optimization. You can either take performance behavior as a first class part of the semantics that you're presenting to the programmer or you can give them control over how they write their programs.