Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 16(3)

Editorial

Olivier Danvy and Peter Thiemann

The present issue is dedicated to Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation. Its first two articles were solicited from papers presented at PEPM'02, the 2002 ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation [3]. The third article was solicited from a paper presented at ICFP'01, the 2001 International Conference on Functional Programming [2]. The three articles were subjected to the usual process of journal reviewing.

"Non-standard semantics for program slicing" builds on Cousot's semantics hierarchy of transition systems and presents a new method for designing compositional semantics of programs in a way that enables reasoning about program transformations that may alter the termination behavior of a program. A preliminary version of this work was presented at PEPM'02.

"Path Dependent Analysis of Logic Programs" presents a framework for designing context-sensitive abstract interpretations of logic programs. It introduces call strings of fixed length and the corresponding abstract domains. The resulting analysis approximates the context in which predicates are called. A preliminary version of this work was presented at PEPM'02.

"Automatic Generation of Staged Geometric Predicates" addresses the problem of computing the sign of a polynomial at a given input value. Many geometric algorithms require this sign computation to be exact and efficient. The solution presented here simplifies and generalizes Jonathan Shewchuk's. This article is the archival version of a work that was presented at ICFP'01.

We conclude this issue with a corrigendum for an article published just 10 years ago [1].

References

1. Harper, B. and M. Lillibridge: 1993, `Polymorphic Type Assignment and CPS Conversion'. LISP and Symbolic Computation 6(3/4), 361-380.

2. Leroy, X. (ed.): 2001, `Proceedings of the 2001 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming', SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 36, No. 10. Firenze, Italy: ACM Press.

3. Thiemann, P. (ed.): 2002, `ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation', SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 37, No 3. Portland, Oregon: ACM Press.
[picture of journal cover]

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