The last years have witnessed a flurry of new results in the area of partial evaluation. These tutorial notes survey the field and present a critical assessment of the state of the art. 1 Introduction Partial evaluation is a source-to-source program transformation technique for specializing programs with respect to parts of their input. In essence, partial evaluation removes layers of interpretation. In the most general sense, an interpreter can be defined as a program whose control flow is determined by its input data. As Abelson points out, [43, Foreword], even programs that are not themselves interpreters have important interpreter-like pieces. These pieces contain both compile-time and run-time constructs. Partial evaluation identifies and eliminates the compile-time constructs. 1.1 A complete example We consider a function producing formatted text. Such functions exist in most programming languages (e.g., format in Lisp and printf in C). Figure 1 displays a formatting functio...

This paper presents a step forward in the use of partial evaluation for interpreting and compiling programs, as well as for automatically generating a compiler from denotational definitions of programming languages. We determine the static and dynamic semantics of a programming language, reduce the expressions representing the static semantics, and generate object code by instantiating the expressions representing the dynamic semantics. By processing the static semantics of the language, programs get compiled. By processing the static semantics of the partial evaluator, compilers are generated. The correctness of a compiler is guaranteed by the correctness of both the executable specification and our partial evaluator. The results reported in this paper improve on previous work in the domain of compiler generation [16, 30], and solves several open problems in the domain of partial evaluation [15]. In essence: ffl Our compilation goes beyond a mere syntax-tosemantics mapping since the ...

. We illustrate a simple and e#ective solution to semantics-based compiling. Our solution is based on "type-directed partial evaluation", and -- our compiler generator is expressed in a few lines, and is e#cient; -- its input is a well-typed, purely functional definitional interpreter in the style of denotational semantics; -- the output of the generated compiler is e#ectively three-address code, in the fashion and e#ciency of the Dragon Book; -- the generated compiler processes several hundred lines of source code per second. The source language considered in this case study is imperative, blockstructured, higher-order, call-by-value, allows subtyping, and obeys stack discipline. It is bigger than what is usually reported in the literature on semantics-based compiling and partial evaluation. Our compiling technique uses the first Futamura projection, i.e., we compile programs by specializing a definitional interpreter with respect to the program. Specialization is carri...

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The objective of this thesis is to explore the connections between abstract interpretation and attribute grammars as frameworks in program analysis. Abstract interpretation is a semantics-based program analysis method. A large class of data flow analysis problems can be expressed as non-standard semantics where the “meaning ” contains information about the runtime behaviour of programs. In an abstract interpretation the analysis is proved correct by relating it to the usual semantics for the language. Attribute grammars provide a method and notation to specify code generation and program analysis directly from the syntax of the programming language. They are especially used for describing compilation of programming languages and very efficient evaluators have been developed for subclasses of attribute grammars. By relating abstract interpretation and attribute grammars we obtain a closer connection between the specification and implementation of abstract interpretations which at the same time facilitates the correctness proofs of interpretations. Implementation and specification of abstract interpretations using circular attribute grammars is realised with an evaluator system for a class of domain theoretic attribute grammars. In this system thecircularity of attribute grammars is resolved by fixpoint iteration. The use of finite lattices in abstract interpretations requires automatic generation of specialised fixpoint iterators. This is done using a technique called lazy fixpoint iteration which is presented in the thesis. Methods from abstract interpretation can also be used in correctness proofs of attribute grammars. This proof technique introduces a new class of attribute grammars based on domain theory. This method is illustrated with examples. i ii SUMMARY