Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 17(1/2)5-6

Editorial

Wei-Ngan Chin, 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 ACMSIGPLANWorkshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation [2], and its last two articles were solicited from papers presented at ASIAPEPM 02, the 2002 SIGPLAN Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation [1]. The four articles were subjected to the usual process of journal reviewing.

"Cost-Augmented Partial Evaluation of Functional Logic Programs" extends previous narrowing-driven techniques of partial evaluation for functional-logic programs by the inclusion of abstract computation costs into the partial-evaluation process. A preliminary version of this work was presented at PEPM 02.

"Specialization Scenarios: A Pragmatic Approach to Declaring Program Specialization" present an interface in Tempo (a major partial evaluator for C) for specifying when and how to specialize functions with respect to static arguments and static global variables. A preliminary version of this work was presented at PEPM 02.

"Program Adaptation via Output-Constraint Specialization" considers a variant of the traditional problem of program specialization. Instead of specializing a program with respect to a subset of its input, the authors specialize a program with respect to a subset of both its input and its output. A preliminary version of this work was presented at ASIA-PEPM 02.

"Using Circular Programs to Deforest in Accumulating Parameters" proposes a technique to eliminate intermediate data structures from consumer/producer pairs with accumulators. A key problem of accumulators is that they capture intermediate data and require multiple traversals. The author solves this problem by integrating the techniques of deforestation and tupling with circular programs. A preliminary version of this work was presented at ASIA-PEPM 02.

References

1. Chin, W.-N. (Ed.). ACM SIGPLAN Asian Symposium on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation. ACM Press, Aizu, Japan, 2002.

2. Thiemann, P. (Ed.). ACM SIGPLAN Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Semantics-Based Program Manipulation. SIGPLAN Notices, vol. 37, no 3. ACM Press, Portland, Oregon, 2002.
[picture of journal cover]

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