We present an overview of the program transformation methodology, focusing our attention on the so-called `rules + strategies' approach in the case of functional and logic programs. The paper is intended to offer an introduction to the subject. The various techniques we present are illustrated via simple examples. A preliminary version of this report has been published in: Moller, B., Partsch, H., and Schuman, S. (eds.): Formal Program Development. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 755, Springer Verlag (1993) 263--304. Also published in: ACM Computing Surveys, Vol 28, No. 2, June 1996. 3 1 Introduction The program transformation approach to the development of programs has first been advocated by [Burstall-Darlington 77], although the basic ideas were already presented in previous papers by the same authors [Darlington 72, Burstall-Darlington 75]. In that approach the task of writing a correct and efficient program is realized in two phases: the first phase consists in writing an in...

The control of polyvariance is a key issue in partial deduction of logic programs. Certainly, only finitely many specialised versions of any procedure should be generated, while, on the other hand, overly severe limitations should not be imposed. In this paper, well-founded orderings serve as a starting point for tackling this so-called "global termination" problem. Polyvariance is determined by the set of distinct "partially deduced" atoms generated during partial deduction. Avoiding ad-hoc techniques, we formulate a quite general framework where this set is represented as a tree structure. Associating weights with nodes, we define a well-founded order among such structures, thus obtaining a foundation for certified global termination of partial deduction. We include an algorithm template, concrete instances of which can be used in actual implementations, prove termination and correctness, and report on the results of some experiments. Finally, we conjecture that the proposed framewor...

Abstract. Recently, considerable advances have been made in the (online) control of logic program specialisation. A clear conceptual distinction has been established between local and global control and on both levels concrete strategies as well as general frameworks have been proposed. For global control in particular, recent work has developed concrete techniques based on the preservation of characteristic trees (limited, however, by a given, arbitrary depth bound) to obtain a very precise control of polyvariance. On the other hand, the concept of an m-tree has been introduced as a refined way to trace “relationships ” of partially deduced atoms, thus serving as the basis for a general framework within which global termination of partial deduction can be ensured in a non ad hoc way. Blending both, formerly separate, contributions, in this paper, we present an elegant and sophisticated technique to globally control partial deduction of normal logic programs. Leaving unspecified the specific local control one may wish to plug in, we develop a concrete global control strategy combining the use of characteristic atoms and trees with global (m-)trees. We thus obtain partial deduction that always terminates in an elegant, non ad hoc way, while providing excellent specialisation as well as fine-grained (but reasonable) polyvariance. We conjecture that a similar approach may contribute to improve upon current (on-line) control strategies for functional program transformation methods such as (positive) supercompilation. 1

Program specialisation aims at improving the overall performance of programs by performing source to source transformations. A common approach within functional and logic programming, known respectively as partial evaluation and partial deduction, is to exploit partial knowledge about the input. It is achieved through a well-automated application of parts of the Burstall-Darlington unfold/fold transformation framework. The main challenge in developing systems is to design automatic control that ensures correctness, efficiency, and termination. This survey and tutorial presents the main developments in controlling partial deduction over the past 10 years and analyses their respective merits and shortcomings. It ends with an assessment of current achievements and sketches some remaining research challenges.

data types are facilitated in Godel by its type and module systems. Thus, in order to describe the meta-programming facilities of Godel, a brief account of these systems is given. Each constant, function, predicate, and proposition in a Godel program must be specified by a language declaration. The type of a variable is not declared but inferred from its context within a particular program statement. To illustrate the type system, we give the language declarations that would be required for the program in Figure 1. BASE Name. CONSTANT Tom, Jerry : Name. PREDICATE Chase : Name * Name; Cat, Mouse : Name. Note that the declaration beginning BASE indicates that Name is a base type. In the statement Chase(x,y) !- Cat(x) & Mouse(y). the variables x and y are inferred to be of type Name. Polymorphic types can also be defined in Godel. They are constructed from the base types, type variables called parameters, and type constructors. Each constructor has an arity 1 attached to it. As an...

The so called “cogen approach” to program specialisation, writing a compiler generator instead of a specialiser, has been used with considerable success in partial evaluation of both functional and imperative languages. This paper demonstrates that this approach is also applicable to partial evaluation of logic programming languages, also called partial deduction. Self-application has not been as much in focus in logic programming as for functional and imperative languages, and the attempts to self-apply partial deduction systems have, of yet, not been altogether that successful. So, especially for partial deduction, the cogen approach should prove to have a considerable importance when it comes to practical applications. This paper first develops a generic offline partial deduction technique for pure logic programs, notably supporting partially instantiated datastructures via binding types. From this a very efficient cogen is derived, which generates very efficient generating extensions (executing up to several orders of magnitude faster than current online systems) which in turn perform very good and non-trivial specialisation, even rivalling existing online systems. All this is supported by extensive benchmarks. Finally, it is shown how the cogen can be extended to directly support a large part of Prolog’s declarative and non-declarative features and how semi-online specialisation can be efficiently integrated.

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In order to exploit specialization opportunities that exist in programs written by researchers outside of the programming language community, a partial evaluator needs to effectively treat existing realistic applications. Our empirical studies have demonstrated real-sized applications extensively use non-liftable values such as pointers and data structures. Therefore, it is essential that the binding-time analysis accurately treats nonliftable values. To achieve this accuracy, we introduce the notion of use sensitivity, and present a use-sensitive binding-time analysis for C programs which is obtained by a forward analysis followed by a backward analysis. This analysis has been implemented and integrated into our partial evaluator for C, called Tempo. To validate the effectiveness of our analysis and demonstrate that use sensitivity is critical to obtain highly-specialized programs, we have conducted experimental studies on various components of existing operating systems code. Our res...

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In [23] we presented a partial evaluation scheme for a "real life" subset of Prolog, containing first-order built-in's, simple side-effects and the operational predicate if-then-else. In this paper we apply this scheme to specialise integrity checking in deductive databases. We present an interpreter which can be used to check the integrity constraints in hierarchical deductive databases. This interpreter incorporates the knowledge that the integrity constraints were not violated prior to a given update sad uses a technique to lift the ground representation to t,e non-ground one for resolution. By partially evaluating this mots-interpreter for certain transaction patterns we are able to obtain very efficient specialised update procedures, executing substantially faster than the original mots-interpreter. The partial eval- uation scheme presented in [23] seems to be capable of tomatically generating highly specialised update procedures for deductive databases.