[Cesare Di Mauro]
I'm playing with the virtual machine and I have some ideas about possibile optimizations that could be applyed. But I need to verify them, so understanding what is possible and what is not, is a primary goal for me.
The best way to understand what is possible is to disassemble bytecode and the look at *exactly* how those are executed by ceval.c. That makes it possible to identify which transformations are semantically neutral. FWIW, I think the path of peephole optimizing been mostly exhausted. A much more fertile field of search is to examine what can be done with the AST. Sections of the tree may provide more context so that a broader range of simplifications and transformations are possible. This should discussion probably be taken off python-dev and moved to to comp.lang.python until the exercise has grown beyond "playing with the virtual machine." Raymond