At Rice University, we have undertaken a project to construct a framework for generating high-level problem solving languages that can achieve high performance on a variety of platforms. The underlying strategy, called telescoping languages, builds problemsolving systems from domain-specific libraries and scripting langauges. To accomplish this it extensively preanalyzes and transforms the library to produce a scripting language precompiler that optimizes library calls within the scripts as if they were primitives in the underlying language. A major technical issue is how to preoptimize a library for use in applications that are yet to be seen. To address this issue, we have conducted a study of applications written in Matlab by the signal processing group at Rice University. This has identified a collection of old and new optimizations that show promise for this particular domain. Two promising new optimizations are procedure vectorization and procedure strength reduction. The latt...