>How do you tell a C compiler that? You'd need dependent types and a compiler that understood exactly how much information in bits was required for a particula

>How do you tell a C compiler that? You'd need dependent types and a compiler that understood exactly how much information in bits was required for a particular proposition, I'm guessing. I think this is the sort of thing (not using tricky assembly instructions specifically, but using unboxed types with expressive type systems) that makes languages like ATS[1] possibly faster than C. The point is: good code generation is possible in theory, even if "sufficiently smart" compilers are too hard to write. (Or are equivalent to general A.I.) [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATS_(programming_language)