[chitil at informatik.rwth-aachen.de: Deforestation in Mercury]

[Fergus Henderson]

-----Forwarded message from Olaf Chitil <chitil at informatik.rwth-aachen.de>-----

Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 11:22:20 +0100
From: Olaf Chitil <chitil at informatik.rwth-aachen.de>
Organization: Aachen University of Technology
To: Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU>
Subject: Deforestation in Mercury

Hello,

In your announcement of Mercury 0.8 I read that you added deforestation to your
implementation. I am intested in deforestation but did not find any further
remarks on it on the Mercury web pages. 

On which method is your deforestation based (e.g. a la Wadler, short cut
deforestation, hylomorphisms, etc)? Is it really effective? The only
implemenations of deforestation in non-toy compilers I know about, i.e. in GHC,
were not very successful. I'm not familiar with Mercury, but as far as I know it
has a strict semantics. In contrast to non-strict languages deforestation can
turn non-terminating programs in strict languages into terminating ones. Is that
an issue for you? Do you have a paper about deforestation in Mercury?

I'd be thankful for any information,

Olaf

-- 
OLAF CHITIL, Lehrstuhl fuer Informatik II, RWTH Aachen, 52056 Aachen, Germany
             Tel: (+49/0)241/80-21212; Fax: (+49/0)241/8888-217
             URL: http://www-i2.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/~chitil/


-----End of forwarded message-----

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "Binaries may die
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |   but source code lives forever"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- leaked Microsoft memo.