Re: mathematical models

[Guillermo J. Rozas <gjr@martigny.ai.mit.edu>]

|   Date: Fri, 6 Jun 1997 14:29:02 -0400 (EDT)
|   From: Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <gls@livia.East.Sun.COM>
|   Subject: Re: mathematical models
|   
|   Because the overall number of choices of evaluation orders for all
|   procedure calls in the compiler is finite, it must be the case that
|   if the compiler compiles the compiler source code, and the resulting
|   compiler is used to compile the same compiler source code, and so on,
|   eventually you must fall into a loop.
|   
|   My question is, what was the length of the loop?

If I recall correctly, we did not determine that -- I don't think that
we let it go far enough.  However, the few instances that we examined
were correct "permutations" of each other, so yes, it should have
cycled eventually, but I seem to recall that the number of actual
choices was non negligible.  It is conceivable that it would
eventually have settled into a cycle of length 1, but we never found
out -- I guess we weren't curious enough (besides the fact that at the
time recompiling the whole system took considerable time).

Chris may remember better than I do.