The Second Futamura Projection for Type-Directed Partial Evaluation

  • Authors:

  • Bernd Grobauer;Zhe Yang

  • Affiliations:

  • BRICS http://www.brics.dk/, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade, Building 540, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark. grobauer@brics.dk;Department of Computer Science, New York University, 251 Mercer Street, New York, NY 10012, USA. zheyang@brics.dk

  • Venue:
  • Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

A generating extension of a program specializes the program with respect to part of the input. Applying a partial evaluator to the program trivially yields a generating extension, but specializing the partial evaluator with respect to the program often yields a more efficient one. This specialization can be carried out by the partial evaluator itself; in this case, the process is known as the second Futamura projection.We derive an ML implementation of the second Futamura projection for Type-Directed Partial Evaluation (TDPE). Due to the differences between ‘traditional’, syntax-directed partial evaluation and TDPE, this derivation involves several conceptual and technical steps. These include a suitable formulation of the second Futamura projection and techniques for making TDPE amenable to self-application. In the context of the second Futamura projection, we also compare and relate TDPE with conventional off-line partial evaluation.We demonstrate our technique with several examples, including compiler generation for Tiny, a prototypical imperative language.