On Sun, Jan 2, 2011 at 5:50 PM, Alex Gaynor <alex.gaynor@gmail.com> wrote:
No, it's singularly impossible to prove that any global load will be any given value at compile time. Any optimization based on this premise is wrong.
True. My proposed way out of this conundrum has been to change the language semantics slightly so that global names which (a) coincide with a builtin, and (b) have no explicit assignment to them in the current module, would be fair game for such optimizations, with the understanding that the presence of e.g. "len = len" anywhere in the module (even in dead code!) would be sufficient to disable the optimization. But barring someone interested in implementing something based on this rule, the proposal has languished for many years. FWIW, this is reminiscent of Fortran's rules for "intrinsics" (its name for builtins), which have a similar optimization behavior (except there the potential overrides that the compiler doesn't need to take into account are load-time definitions). -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)