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The essence of program transformation by partial evaluation and driving

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Logic, Language and Computation

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 792))

Abstract

An abstract framework is developed to describe program transformation by specializing a given program to a restricted set of inputs. Particular cases include partial evaluation [19] and Turchin's more powerful “driving” transformation [33]. Such automatic program speedups have been seen to give quite signifcant speedups in practical applications.

This paper's aims are similar to those of [18]: better to understand the fundamental mathematical phenomena that make such speedups possible. The current paper is more complete than [18], since it precisely formulates correctness of code generation; and more powerful, since it includes program optimizations not achievable by simple partial evaluation. Moreover, for the first time it puts Turchin's driving methodology on a solid semantic foundation which is not tied to any particular programming language or data structure.

This work was supported in part by the Danish Natural Science Research Council (DART project) and by an Esprit Basic Research Action (Semantique).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. DIKU, University of Copenhagen, Universitetsparken 1, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Neil D. Jones

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  1. Neil D. Jones
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Neil D. Jones Masami Hagiya Masahiko Sato

Additional information

This paper is dedicated to Satoru Takasu with thanks for good advice early in my career on how to do research, and for insight into how to see the essential part of a new problem.

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© 1994 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Jones, N.D. (1994). The essence of program transformation by partial evaluation and driving. In: Jones, N.D., Hagiya, M., Sato, M. (eds) Logic, Language and Computation. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 792. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0032402

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0032402

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