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On the degeneration of program generators by program composition

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Abstract

One of the main discoveries in the seventies was that the concept of a generating extension covers a very wide class of apparently different program generators. Program specialization, or partial evaluation, is powerful because it provides uniform techniques for the automatic implementation of generating extensions from ordinary programs. The Futamura projections stand as the cornerstone of the development of program specialization.

This paper takes the idea of the Futamura projections further. Threedegeneration projections are formulated which tell us how to achieve the reverse goal by program composition, namely turning a generating extension into an ordinary program. The fact that program composition can invert the effect of program specialization shows that these projections are dual in a sense. The degeneration projections complete a missing link between programs and generating extensions and allow for novel applications of program transformation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, Universitets parken 1, DK-2100, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Robert Glück

  2. Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, Russian Academy of Sciences, Miusskaya Square 4, RU-125047, Moscow, Russia

    Andrei Klimov

Authors
  1. Robert Glück
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  2. Andrei Klimov
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Additional information

This work was partly supported by the project “Design, Analysis and Reasoning about Tools” funded by the Danish Natural Sciences Research Council. The first author was also supported by an Erwin-Schrödinger-Fellowship of the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) under grant J0780 & J0964; the second author partly by the Russian Basic Research Foundation grant 93-01-00628 & 96-01-01315, the US Office of Naval Research grant N00014-96-1-0800, and the US Civilian Research and Development Foundation grant RMI-254.

Robert Glück: He is an associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Copenhagen. He received his M. Sc. and Ph. D. degrees in 1986 and 1991 from the University of Technology in Vienna, where he also worked as assistant professor. He was research assistant at the City University of New York and twice received the Erwin-Schrödinger-Fellowship of the Austrian Science Foundation. His research interests include advanced programming languages, theory and practice of program transformation, and metaprogramming.

Andrei V. Klimov: He is a senior researcher at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, the Russian Academy of Sciences. After receiving his M.Sc. degree from Moscow State University in 1976, he worked in a research institute in electronic industry, where developed software for microprocessors. Since 1983, when he changed to Keldysh Institute, his main research interests are functional programming, theory and methods of program transformation and optimization, and their application to practical programming languages and problems.

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Glück, R., Klimov, A. On the degeneration of program generators by program composition. NGCO 16, 75–95 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037321

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03037321

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