Turchin The Concept of a Supercompiler英文电子书.pdf

The Concept of a Supercompiler VALENTIN F. TURCHIN The City College of New York A supercompiler is a program transformer of a certain type. It traces the possible generalized histories of computation by the original program, and compiles an equivalent program, reducing in the process the redundancy that could be present in the original program. The nature of the redundancy that can be eliminated by supercompilation may be various, e.g., some variables might have predefined values (as in partial evaluation), or the structure of control transfer could be made more efficient (as in lazy evaluation), or it could simply be the fact that the same variable is used more than once. The general principles of supercompilation are described and compared with the usual approach to program transformation as a stepwise application of a number of equivalence rules. It is argued that the language Refal serves the needs of supercompilation best. Refal is formally defined and compared with Prolog and other languages. Examples are given of the operation of a Refal supercompiler implemented at CCNY on an IBM/370. Categories and Subject Descriptors: D.l.l [Programming Techniques] Applicative (Functional) Programming; D.3.1 [Programming Languages] Formal Definition and Theory; D.3.4 [Program- ming Languages]: Processors-compilers, interpreters, optimization, compiler generators; F.l.l [Computation by Abstract Devices] Models of Computation General Terms: Languages, Performance, Theory Additional Key Words and Phrases: Program transformation, lazy evaluatio