Metamorphic programming

Metamorphic programming is an effective tool for creating efficient and elegant solutions to many programming problems, at least once you get over the shock of seeing code that violates many of the accepted rules of good programming. We have used metamorphosis for many years to solve problems in the logic-level simulation of VLSI circuits. These solutions have provided some spectacular gains in performance, inspiring us to look for metamorphic solutions to other problems. We have found metamorphic solutions to many problems including string searching, sorting, and depth first search, most of which provide performance gains over conventional coding. A few of these solutions are presented here. These programs violate the rules of good programming, but with a few minor compiler enhancements, our programming techniques become clean and well structured.