* The earliest "COBOL Optimizer" was developed by [[Capex Corporation]] in the mid 1970s for [[COBOL]]. This type of optimizer depended, in this case", upon knowledge of "weaknesses'" in the standard IBM COBOL compiler, and actually replaced (or [[patch (computing)|patch]]ed) sections of the object code with more efficient code. The replacement code might replace a linear [[lookup table|table lookup]] with a [[binary search algorithm|binary search]] for example or sometimes simply replace a relatively slow instruction with a known faster one that was otherwise functionally equivalent within its context. This technique is now known as [[strength reduction]]. For example, on the [[IBM/360]] hardware the <code>CLI</code> instruction was, depending on the particular model, between twice and 5 times as fast as a <code>CLC</code> instruction for single byte comparisons.<ref name="IBM"/><ref name="Evans_1982"/>
