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Showing posts from January, 2008

Supercompiltation

I've lately been working on my disertation concering a program transformation technique known as Distillation. Distillation is a technique inspired by supercompilation. Supercompilation involves mapping terms from a particular language to other terms of the same language. It can be though of as a semantics preserving rewriting system, or a function which maps terms to other terms which are equal modulo some semantic interpretation relation. A really strait-forward description of supercompilation is given by XXX on his paper on supercompilation for Haskell. This work leverages work by Gluck and Sorenson but presents generalisation in a very clear and declarative way, which is a notable exception to most of the literature in this field. Generalisation is actually quite a tricky problem. Generalisation has some of the same problems as the old problem with standards. That is, the thing about standards is that there are so many to chose from. It takes quite a bit of effort to