Summary
This paper describes a technique for transforming functional programs that repeatedly traverse a data structure into more efficient alternatives that do not. The transformation makes essential use of lazy evaluation and local recursion (such as provided by letrec, or its equivalent) to build a circular program that, on one pass over the structure, determines the effects of the individual traversals and then combines them.
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Bird, R.S. Using circular programs to eliminate multiple traversals of data. Acta Informatica 21, 239–250 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264249
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00264249