Virtually every compiler performs transformations on the program it is compiling in an attempt to improve efficiency. Despite their importance, however, there have been few systematic attempts to categorise such transformations and measure their ...

A number of compilers exploit the following strategy: translate a term to continuation-passing style (CPS) and optimize the resulting term using a sequence of reductions. Recent work suggests that an alternative strategy is superior: optimize directly ...

We define a weak λ-calculus, λσ_w, as a subsystem of the full λ-calculus with explicit substitutions λσ⇑. We claim that λσ_w could be the archetypal output language of functional compilers, just as ...

The context for this paper is functional computation by graph reduction. Our overall aim is more efficient use of memory. The specific topic is the detection of dormant cells in the live graph --- those retained in heap memory though not actually ...

Identifying some pointers as invisible threads, for the purposes of storage management, is a generalization from several widely used programming conventions, like threaded trees. The necessary invariant is that nodes that are accessible (without threads)...

In this paper we present a new program analysis method which we call Storage Use Analysis. This analysis deduces how objects are used by the program and allows the optimization of their allocation. This analysis can be applied to both statically typed ...

Traditional techniques for designing and analyzing amortized data structures in an imperative setting are of limited use in a functional setting because they apply only to single-threaded data structures, yet functional data structures can be non-single-...

In functional programming, small programs are often glued together to construct a complex program. Program fusion is an optimizing process whereby these small programs are fused into a single one and intermediate data structures are removed. Recent work ...

We address the problem of dependency analysis and caching in the context of the λ-calculus. The dependencies of a λ-term are (roughly) the parts of the λ-term that contribute to the result of evaluating it. We introduce a mechanism ...

We investigate the computational efficiency of the sharing graphs of Lamping [Lam90], Gonthier, Abadi, and Lévy [GAL92], and Asperti [Asp94], designed to effect so-called optimal evaluation, with the goal of reconciling optimality, efficiency, ...

An extension of the simply-typed lambda calculus is presented which contains both well-structured inductive and coinductive types, and which also identifies a class of types for which general recursion is possible. The motivations for this work are ...

In this paper we present a construction smoothly integrating pattern matching with abstract data types. We review some previous proposals [19, 23, 20, 6, 1] and their drawbacks, and show how our proposal can solve them. In particular we pay attention to ...

This paper studies type inference for a functional, ML-style language with subtyping, and focuses on the issue of simplifying inferred constraint sets. We propose a powerful notion of entailment between constraint sets, as well as an algorithm to check ...

System kernel Fun is an abstract version of the system Fun defined by Cardelli's and Wegner's seminal paper [CW85], and is strictly related to system F≤. Extensions of these two systems are currently the basis of most proposals for strong type ...

We present the formal semantics of future in a Scheme-like language which has both side-effects and first-class continuations. Correctness is established by proving that programs annotated by future have the same observable behaviour as their non-...

Our purpose is to promote a second-class mechanism --- the synchronization barrier --- to a first-class value. We introduce the synchron, a novel synchronization mechanism that enables the coordination of a dynamically varying set of concurrent threads ...

This paper describes the distributed memory implementation of a shared memory parallel functional language. The language is Id, an implicitly parallel, mostly functional language that is currently evolving into a dialect of Haskell. The target is a ...

We have designed and implemented a program-generator generator (PGG) for an untyped higher-order functional programming language. The program generators perform continuation-based multi-level offline specialization and thus combine the most powerful and ...

The designs and implementations of efficient aggregate data structures have been important issues in functional programming. It is not clear how to select a good representation for an aggregate when access patterns to the aggregate are highly variant, ...

Concurrent ML (CML) is an extension of Standard ML of New Jersey with concurrent features similar to those of process algebra. In this papes we build upon John Reppy's reduction semantics for CML by constructing a compositional operational semantics for ...

In this paper we prove time and space bounds for the implementation of the programming language NESL on various parallel machine models. NESL is a sugared typed λ-calculus with a set of array primitives and an explicit parallel map over arrays. ...

Synchronous data-flow is a programming paradigm which has been successfully applied in reactive systems. In this context, it can be characterized as some class of static bounded memory data-flow networks. In particular, these networks are not ...

A context in the λ-calculus is a term with some holes. Hole filling differs from β-substitution in that name capture is intended. This seemingly simple feature transcends static scope and lies at the heart of modular and object-oriented ...

Nowadays the Net is one of the most obvious driving forces. Yet, to consider it as one global store through which values and code may be shared is still immature. This paper suggests first-class environments as a means to achieve that goal in a multi-...

Mixin modules are proposed as a new construct for module languages, allowing recursive definitions to span module boundaries. Mixin modules are proposed specifically for the Standard ML language. Several applications are described, including the ...