Abstract. We have developed and implemented a partial evaluator for a subset of Fortran 77. A partial evaluator is a tool for program transformation which takes as input a general program and a part of its input, and produces as output a specialized program. The goal is efficiency: a specialized program often runs an order of magnitude faster than the general program. The partial evaluator is based on the off-line approach and uses a binding-time analysis prior to the specialization phase. The source language includes multi-dimensional arrays, procedures and functions, as well as global storage. The system is presented and experimental results are given.

Our goal is to incorporate state-of-the-art partial evaluation in a library of general-purpose algorithms -in particular, mathematical algorithms -in order to allow the automatic creation of efficient, special-purpose programs. The main goal is efficiency: a specialized program often runs significantly faster than its generic version.This paper shows how a binding-time analysis can be used to identify potential sources for specialization in mathematical algorithms. The method is surprisingly simple and effective. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach we used an automatic partial evaluator for Fortran that we developed. Results for five well-known algorithms show that some remarkable speedup factors can be obtained on a uniprocessor architecture.

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