Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut

Programming Research Group

Partial Evaluation

Partial evaluation is an automatic program transformation technique based on aggressive constant propagation. The partial evaluator generates from a program whose input is partially known at compile time a specialized version of the program that will only accept the remaining inputs. The specialized version, called the residual program, when applied to the remaining inputs, will produce the same results as the original program, applied to the full input.

Partial evaluation can reduce interpretative overhead in program execution and thus lead to substantial speedups. Specifically interesting is the generation of compilers from interpreters by self-application, i.e. the application of a partial evaluator to itself.

We have studied several aspects of partial evaluation, for instance:

• Implementation of partial evaluators
• automatic generation of programm transformers
• automatic generation of optimizing compilers
• Parser generation
• Binding time analysis
• Specialization of ML programs.

Address

Universität Tübingen

Wilhelm-Schickard-Institut für Informatik

Sand 13

D-72076 Tübingen

Germany

Fon:

+49 7071 29-78955

Fax:

+49 7071 29-5082