Integrating partial evaluators into interpreters

  • Authors:

  • Kenichi Asai

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information Science, Faculty of Science, University of Tokyo, Japan and "Information and Human Activity," PRESTO, JST

  • Venue:
  • SAIG'01 Proceedings of the 2nd international conference on Semantics, applications, and implementation of program generation
  • Year:
  • 2001

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

This paper describes our first step towards the integration of partial evaluation into standard interpretation. The two main issues in this integration are the treatment of heap objects and side-effects. To enable specialization with respect to the heap objects that are allocated beforehand in standard evaluation, specialization is performed with respect to the heap state at specialization time rather than based on a program text input so far. To avoid duplication of heap objects, direct references to heap objects are allowed in the specialized programs, in addition to the use of the conventional let-insertion technique. Despite our modest approach on side-effects that we allow partial evaluation of only side-effect free portions of a program, the resulting system covers some typical cases, such as the use of partial evaluation during an interactive debugging session. It also enables us to specialize a (side-effect free) program with respect to cyclic data structures, which was not easy before. We formalize this integration using store semantics and state its correctness. The system is implemented in Scheme and various examples are tested. Among them, we show specialization of a ray tracing program.