Techniques for partial evaluation of imperative languages

Abstract

Various techniques for the partial evaluation of imperative programs with subroutines and possible side-effects are presented. They cover dynamic annotations, a new polyvariant computation scheme, specialization of procedures and functions including call-by-result and call-by-reference parameters. Preprocessing is applied to compute the callgraph and information about the occurrences of global variables. We use an abstract interpretation technique for postprocessing, which is used to eliminate unnecessary assignments and to determine the variables which have to be declared. The language related to the partial evaluator is a subset of Pascal with some minor changes. © 1991, ACM. All rights reserved.