partial evaluation

David Feuer David_Feuer@brown.edu
Fri, 1 Feb 2002 2:40:35 -0500


It seems to me that it might be useful (and probably 
fairly easy) to add to GHC a limited sort of partial 
evaluation: programmer-designated top-level CAFs could be 
evaluated to WHNF during compilation.  Termination of that 
compiler phase would obviously not be guaranteed, but if 
this were possible, I am guessing it would be very useful 
for some applications, such as combinator-based parsers.  
The parsers would then be generated at compiler time 
rather than re-generated every time the parser is 
executed.  If GHC in fact supports something of this 
nature, I would love to hear about it.  If it does not, I 
would guess it would probably be fairly easy to add to the 
end of the code generation phase.

David Feuer

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