alt Hacker News> I always code with the mindset “the compiler is smarter than me.”
Like with people in general, it depends on what compiler/interpreter we're talking about, I'll freely grant that clang is smarter than me, but CPython for sure isn't. :)
More generally, canonicalization goes very far, but no farther than language semantics allows. Not even the notorious "sufficiently smart compiler" with infinite time can figure out what you don't tell it.
To add to this, the low-level constraints also make this assumption noisy, no matter how smart the compiler is. On the CPython case, if you do `dis.dis('DAY = 24 * 60 * 60)` you will see that constant folding nicely converts it to `LOAD_CONST 86400`. However, if you try `dis.dis('ATOMS_IN_THE_WORLD = 10*50')` you will get LOAD_CONST 10, LOAD_CONST 50, BINARY_OP **.