Unlike other instructions, which compute or test values, unconditional branch instructions do no useful work.Rather, they are artifacts of the translation from a flow graph to the linear form of conventional machine language.Careful ordering of the basic blocks of a program can decrease the number of branches required by allowing a basic block to "fall through" to a successor.It is shown that although the general problem of minimizing the number of branches is NP-complete, an efficient algorithm is possible for "structured" programs--those written without goto statements.More specifically, an algorithm is presented that produces an optimal ordering of the basic blocks of any program that uses only the control structures if-then-else, loop, and exit.The running time of the algorithm is proportional to the length of the program, provided the number of loops exited by any exit statement can be bounded by a constant.

Article Free Access Share on Optimal code for control structures Authors: M. V. S. Ramanath University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, CanadaView Profile , Marvin Solomon Universiy of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin Universiy of Wisconsin, Madison, WisconsinView Profile Authors Info & Claims POPL '82: Proceedings of the 9th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languagesJanuary 1982 Pages 82–94https://doi.org/10.1145/582153.582163Online:25 January 1982Publication History 0citation207DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads207Last 12 Months5Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF