ion. A common form of transformation, which is easily justified by appealing to reversibility, is abstraction. The abstraction transformation lifts some instances of subexpressions from the right-hand sides of a set of definitions and replaces them with function calls for some new functions. The abstraction process can be used in conjunction with a call-by-need implementation to avoid repeated evaluation of subexpressions. A well-known example is Hughes' supercombinator abstraction [Hughes 1982]. Another form of abstraction which is common in program transformation is syntactic generalization in which an expression e is replaced by a function call g e 1 : : : e n , where g is a new function defined by g x 1 : : : xn \Delta = e 0 , such that e j e 0 f e 1 : : : e n= x 1 : : : xn g. General statements about abstractions and their correctness are notationally rather complex. In practice we have found it is easier to appeal to a reversibility argument on a case-by-case basis than...

The goal of program transformation is to improve efficiency while preserving meaning. One of the best known transformation techniques is Burstall and Darlington's unfold-fold method. Unfortunately the unfold-fold method itself guarantees neither improvement in efficiency nor total-correctness. The correctness problem for unfold-fold is an instance of a strictly more general problem: transformation by locally equivalence-preserving steps does not necessarily preserve (global) equivalence. This paper presents a condition for the total correctness of transformations on recursive programs, which, for the first time, deals with higher-order functional languages (both strict and non-strict) including lazy data structures. The main technical result is an improvement theorem which says that if the local transformation steps are guided by certain optimisation concerns (a fairly natural condition for a transformation), then correctness of the transformation follows. The improvement theorem make...

uCRL resemblesymbolic representations of transition systems, that can be further transformed and analyzed by many of the existing toolsand techniques. We aim at proving the correctness of this linearization algorithm. To this end we use an equivalence rela-tion on recursive specifications in uCRL that is model inde-pendent and does not involve an explicit notion of solution. 1 Introduction In this paper we address the issue of linearization of recur-sive specifications in the specification language