[gmueckl]

I believe the parent wants to know how a sequence of IR instructions with alternating modes is translated to the target.

My guess would be that explicit state state changes show up in the generated machine code.

[StefanKarpinski]

Right, the question becomes: if you have `(a + b) + c` and one of the `+` operations allows re-association but the other one doesn't, then what happens? The problem being that associativity is a property that only makes sense for an entire tree of associable operations, not individual ones.