FSTTCS 1985: Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science pp 116-128 | Cite as
Program simplification via symbolic interpretation
Abstract
We investigate a specific program transformation technique, called simplification, which is a generalization of the "mixed computation" technique due to Ershov. Our technique allows one to develop truly generalized programs to be reused several times, for particular cases of their expected inputs.
Given a subset D' of an input domain D, specified via predicates on program variables, and a generalized program P, simplification yields a program P' which implements the same transformation as P on input data restriced to D', but is considerably more efficient than P. We give examples and outline the structure of a prototype implementation, which is built on top of a symbolic intepreter for Pascal.
Keywords
Generalize Program Conditional Statement Sorting Algorithm Program Variable Prototype ImplementationPreview
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