Issue No.08 - August (1985 vol.11)
V. Ambriola , Dipartimento di Informatica, Universit? di Pisa
A class of transformations of functional programs based on symbolic execution and simplification of conditionals is presented. The operational symbolic semantics of a family of functional languages is defined exploiting a set-theoretic notion of symbolic constants. An effective transformation able to simplify a functional program via removal of conditionals is discussed. Finally, it is shown that a structural approach, based on abstract data type specifications, provides a suitable representation for symbolic constants.
symbolic evaluation, Abstract data type specifications, functional programming languages, program reduction, program transformations, rewriting systems
V. Ambriola, F. Giannotti, D. Pedreschi, F. Turini, "Symbolic Semantics and Program Reduction", IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol.11, no. 8, pp. 784-794, August 1985, doi:10.1109/TSE.1985.232527