COMPILER HAVING GLOBAL ELEMENT OPTIMIZATION

An optimization technique is provided which automatically reduces the number of globals in a program to the minimum required. The optimization technique identifies those elements which are placed in a program as global elements, but which do not need to be global elements. The optimization technique parses all files in a program, identifies all global elements, and removes any global elements that are not used outside of a particular file within the program by converting these global elements to local elements or by disregarding those elements.