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Extracting the Essence of Distillation

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Perspectives of Systems Informatics (PSI 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 5947))

Abstract

In this paper, we give a re-formulation of our previously defined distillation algorithm, which can automatically transform higher-order functional programs into equivalent tail-recursive programs. Our re-formulation simplifies the presentation of the transformation and hopefully makes it easier to understand. Using distillation, it is possible to produce superlinear improvement in the run-time of programs. This represents a significant advance over deforestation, partial evaluation and positive supercompilation, which can only produce a linear improvement.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, Dublin City University, Ireland

    G. W. Hamilton

Authors
  1. G. W. Hamilton
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. (1941-2009), The Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel New York University, NY, USA

    Amir Pnueli

  2. Siberian Division of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A.P. Ershov Institute of Informatics Systems, 6, Acad. Lavrentiev pr., 630090, Novosibirsk, Russia

    Irina Virbitskaite

  3. Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, M13 9PL, Manchester, UK

    Andrei Voronkov

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Hamilton, G.W. (2010). Extracting the Essence of Distillation. In: Pnueli, A., Virbitskaite, I., Voronkov, A. (eds) Perspectives of Systems Informatics. PSI 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5947. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-11486-1_13

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-11485-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-11486-1

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