On-demand Evaluation by Program Transformation1 1Work partially supported by CICYT TIC2001-2705-C03-01 and MCYT grants HA2001-0059 and HU2001-0019.
Marı́a Alpuente, Santiago Escobar, Salvador Lucas · Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science · 2003
Strategy annotations are used in eager programming languages (e.g., OBJ2, OBJ3, CafeOBJ, and Maude) for improving efficiency and/or reducing the risk of nontermination. Syntactically, they are given either as lists of natural numbers or as lists of integers associated to function symbols whose (absolute) values refer to the arguments of the corresponding symbol. A positive index forces the evaluation of an argument whereas a negative index means “evaluation on-demand”. Recently, we have introduced a formal description of the operational meaning of such on-demand strategy annotations which improves previous formalizations that were lacking satisfactory computational properties. In this paper, we introduce an automatic, semantics-preserving program transformation which produces a program (without negative annotations) which can be then correctly executed by typical OBJ interpreters. Moreover, to demonstrate the practicality of our ideas, the program transformation has been implemented (in Haskell) and we compare the evaluation of transformed programs with the original ones on a set of representative benchmarks.