Summary: A Syntactic Approach to Program Transformations
Zena M. Ariola
Aiken Computational Laboratory
Harvard University
Arvind
Laboratory for Computer Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract: Kid, a language for expressing compiler opti­
mizations for functional languages is introduced. The lan­
guage is –­calculus based but treats let­blocks as first class
objects. Let­blocks and associated rewrite rules provide the
basis to capture the sharing of subexpressions precisely. The
language goes beyond –­calculus by including I­structures
which are essential to express efficient translations of list and
array comprehensions. A calculus and a parallel interpreter
for Kid are developed. Many commonly known program
transformations are also presented. A partial evaluator for
Kid is developed and a notion of correctness of Kid trans­
formations based on the syntactic structure of terms and
printable answers is presented.

Source: Ariola, Zena M. - Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Oregon

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences