Improving offline narrowing-driven partial evaluation using size-change graphs

Abstract

An offline approach to narrowing-driven partial evaluation (a partial evaluation scheme for first-order functional and functional logic programs) has recently been introduced. In this approach, program annotations (i.e., the expressions that should be generalised at partial evaluation time to ensure termination) are based on a simple syntactic characterisation of quasi-terminating programs. This work extends the previous offline scheme by introducing a new annotation strategy which is based on a combination of size-change graphs and binding-time analysis. Preliminary experiments point out that the number of program annotations is significantly reduced compared to the previous approach, which means that faster residual programs are often produced. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.