Chapter 13. Arithmetic and Logical Expressions

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One of the major advances that high-level languages provide over low-level languages is the use of algebraic arithmetic and logical expressions (from now on, I’ll just refer to them as arithmetic expressions). High-level language arithmetic expressions are an order of magnitude more readable than the sequence of machine instructions the compiler produces. However, the conversion process (from arithmetic expressions into machine code) is also one of the more difficult transformations to do efficiently, and a fair percentage of a typical compiler’s optimization phase is dedicated to handling the transformation. ...

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