Long Branches

[Tom Stockfisch]

In article <53900001 at umn-cs.UUCP> herndon at umn-cs.UUCP (Robert Herndon) writes:
>I've had this problem a few times.  Try invoking the optimizer
>on your file.  The optimizer gets the assembly code before the
>assembler does, recognizes that the branch is inappropriate
>(or something, anyway) and generates an appropriate branch.

Are you sure your optimizer isn't just optimizing away enough instructions
to make the switch no longer span >64K bytes?  I had the optimizer on
a vax 4.2BSD system save me this way once.

By the way, I don't think a huge switch is necessarily indicative of
a poorly structured program.  The switch could be the result of preprocessor
replacement or be generated by another program such as yacc.  In the program
I wrote where I ran into this trouble my longest function consisted of
40 source code lines, and all the others were less than 20.  The whole
source file was ~250 lines (including copious comments), yet "cc" generated
a ".s" file of 1.2 megabytes.

|| Tom Stockfisch, UCSD Chemistry	tps%chem at sdcsvax.UCSD