The narrowing-driven approach to functional logic program specialization

Partial evaluation is a semantics-based program optimization technique which has been investigated within different programming paradigms and applied to a wide variety of languages. Recently, a partial evaluation framework for functional logic programs has been proposed. In this framework, narrowing—the standard operational semantics of integrated languages—is used to drive the partial evaluation process. This paper surveys the essentials of narrowing-driven partial evaluation. Elvira Albert, Ph.D.: She is an associate professor in Computer Science at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. She received her bachelors degree in computer science in 1998 and her Ph.D. in computer science in 2001, both from the Technical University of Valencia. She has investigated on program optimization and on partial evaluation for declarative multi-paradigm programming languages. Her current research interests include term rewriting, multi-paradigm declarative programming, and formal methods, in particular semantics-based program analysis, transformation, specification, verification, and debugging. Germán Vidal, Ph.D.: He is an associate professor in Computer Science at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain. He obtained his bachelors degree in computer science in 1992 and his Ph.D. in computer science in 1996, both from the Technical University of Valencia. He is active on several research topics in Functional Logic Programming. He has worked on compositionality, on abstract interpretation, and on program transformation techniques for functional logic programs. Currently, his research interests include declarative multi-paradigm programming languages, term rewriting, and semantics-based program manipulation, in particular partial evaluation.