Partial evaluation and separate compilation

Abstract

Hitherto all partial evaluators have processed a complete program to produce a complete residual program. We are interested in treating programs as collections of modules which can be processed independently: 'separate partial evaluation', so to speak. In this paper we still assume that the original program is processed in its entirety, but we show how to specialise it to the static data bit-by-bit, generating a different module for each bit. When the program to be specialised is an interpreter, this corresponds to specializing it to one module of its object language at a time: each module of the object language gives rise to one module of the residual program.

A model for software plans

“…For example, program slicing [18,21] attempts to reduce the complexity of code by extracting only those lines of code that can alter, or are altered by, the value of a particular variable. Similarly, partial evaluation [10,11] creates a specialized version of a program based on given values of a subset of the inputs. In both cases, the resulting code is a working program that is similar to a plan, insofar as it is a complete, compilable subset of the original code.…”