Register variables... :-)

[Arthur David Olson]

> His program spent much of its time calling several fairly large procedures
> isolated in a module.  These were called thousands of times and usually
> simply returned after making one simple comparison, but occasionally they
> did something complex.  This happened seldom enough so it mattered little
> whether they used register variables.  The DEC-compiled version apparently
> spent an awful lot of time just saving and restoring unchanged registers.

If only the copy-on-write register instructions had worked on early 750's. :-)
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