A bibliography on partial evaluation
Peter Sestoft, Harald Søndergaard · ACM SIGPLAN Notices · 1988
introduction to partial evaluation and an extensive, annotated bibliography to the field.The bibliography is restricted to cover public-domain literature in English. Partial EvaluationPartial evaluation is concerned with transforming a program p, given some knowledge about p's input.In general such knowledge may be represented by a predicate q~(_v) about the sequence _v of p's input variables.For simplicity we assume that q~ is of the form x = a, where x is p's first input variable and a is a constant in the language in which p is written.We call this language the subject language and p the subject program.The program r that results from partial evaluation is called a residual program for p given that x = a.In general, r may be written in any programming language, but we restrict attention to source-to-source transformations and assume that r is written in the same language as p (the subject language).Partial evaluation must preserve the semantics of p in the following sense.Let E v a l p f! denote the result of evaluating (running) program p with input sequence 4, and let a .h denote the sequence with head a and tail h.Then if r is a residual program for p given that x = a, the requirement is that E v a l r h = E v a l p a .h