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Transformationin the Glasgow Haskell CompilerSimon
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | Jones, P. Santos, Andr E |
| Copyright Year | 1994 |
| Abstract | In this paper we describe the full set of local program transformations implemented in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. The transformations are presented as source to source transformations in a simple functional language. The idea is that by composing these simple and small high level transformations one can achieve most of the beneets of more complicated and specialised transformations, many of which are often implemented as code generation optimisations. 1 Motivation Quite a few compilers use the compilation by transformation idiom. The idea is that as much as possible of the compilation process is expressed as correctness-preserving transformations, each of which transforms a program into a semantically equivalent program that (hopefully) executes more quickly or in less space. Functional languages are particularly amenable to this approach because they have a particularly rich family of possible transformations. Examples of transformation based compilers include the Orbit compiler ((9]), Kelsey's compilers Of course many, perhaps most, other compilers also use transformation to some degree. Compilation by transformation uses automatic transformations; that is, those which can safely be applied automatically by a compiler. There is also a whole approach to programming, which we might call programming by transformation , in which the programmer manually transforms an ineecient speciic-ation into an eecient program. This development process might be supported by a programming environment which does the book keeping, but the key steps are guided by the programmer. We focus exclusively on automatic transformations in this paper. Automatic program transformations seem to fall into two broad categories: Glamorous transformations are global, sophisticated, intellectually satisfying transformations, sometimes guided by some interesting kind of analysis. |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.cin.ufpe.br/~alms/ps/comp_by_transf_in_ghc.ps.gz |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | http://www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/~ralf/teaching/IFPL/simplifier.ps.gz |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
