Deforestation Transforming Programs To Eliminate Trees

PhilipWadler. Deforestation: Transforming Programs to Eliminate Trees. European Symposium on Programming (ESOP'88), Nancy, France. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 344--358, volume 300, Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1988. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/wadler90deforestation.html

Abstract

An algorithm that transforms programs to eliminate intermediate trees is presented. The algorithm applies to any term containing only functions with definitions in a given syntactic form, and is suitable for incorporation in an optimising compiler. Intermediate lists---and, more generally, intermediate trees---are both the basis and the bane of a certain style of programming in functional languages.

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CategoryPaper | -- EelcoVisser - 14 May 2001