We introduce a new transformation method to eliminate intermediate data structures occurring in functional programs due to repeated list concatenations and other data manipulations (additionally exemplified with list reversal and mapping of functions over lists). The general idea is to uniformly abstract from data constructors and manipulating operations by means of rank-2 polymorphic combinators that exploit algebraic properties of these operations to provide an optimized implementation. The correctness of transformations is proved by using the free theorems derivable from parametric polymorphic types.

Abstract. The difference-list technique is described in literature as effective method for extending lists to the right without using calls of append/3. There exist some proposals for automatic transformation of list programs into differencelist programs. However, we are interested in construction of difference-list programs by the programmer, avoiding the need of a transformation step. In [GG09] it was demonstrated, how left-recursive procedures with a dangling call of append/3 can be transformed into right-recursion using the unfolding technique. For simplification of writing difference-list programs using a new cons/2 procedure was introduced. In the present paper, we investigate how efficieny is influenced using cons/2. We measure the efficiency of procedures using accumulator technique, cons/2, DCG’s, and difference lists and compute the resulting speedup in respect to the simple procedure definition using append/3. Four Prolog systems were investigated and we found different behaviour concerning the speedup by difference lists. A result of our investigations is, that an often advice given in the literature for avoiding calls append/3 could not be confirmed in this strong formulation. 1