Fortran Program Specialization

Abstract

We have developed and implemented a partial evaluator for a subset of Fortran 77. A partial evaluator is a tool for program transformation which takes as input a general program and a part of its input, and produces as output a specialized program. The goal is efficiency: a specialized program often runs an order of magnitude faster than the general program. The partial evaluator is based on the offline approach and uses a binding-time analysis prior to the specialization phase. The source language includes multi-dimensional arrays, procedures and functions, as well as global storage. The system is presented and experimental results are given. © 1995, ACM. All rights reserved.