Re: static estimation of conditional branches?

> I surmised that the original poster was asking if there was any empirical
> data to say that "most if-tests are taken" or "most if-tests are not
> taken". However, I would think that such conclusions would be heavily
> influenced by programming style and the programmer's personal preferences.


This does suggest a heuristic such as the following:


If one side of a conditional contains exit(nonzero), the word "error", or
an fprintf(stderr,...) or perror(), predict that side of the conditional
not to be taken.


Sure, it's dirty. But it's better than annotating with a #pragma. And
it's the sort of thing human programmers do all the time.
--
Andy Glew, glew@ichips.intel.com
Intel Corp., M/S JF1-19, 5200 NE Elam Young Pkwy,
Hillsboro, Oregon 97124-6497
--

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