Toward automation of generating incremental computation mechanisms
Bambang Nurcahyo Prastowo · Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research · 1994
In interactive applications, a user often modifies small parts of some base structure and expects the system to immediately feed back some information reflecting the modification. Obtaining the required information may involve some expensive computation. When a user modification only affects a localized part of the computation, the system should perform only minimal work necessary to present updated computation output. A schema relating incremental and non incremental programs is formalized. The goal is that, given formal semantics of some programming language, we can easily refine the schema to a complete specification of a system transforming a program written in the language into a semantically equivalent program capable of performing incremental computations.