Compilation of functional languages by program transformation

Abstract

One of the most important issues concerning functional languages is the efficiency and the correctness of their implementation. We focus on sequential implementations for conventional von Neumann computers. The compilation process is described in terms of program transformations in the functional framework. The original functional expression is transformed into a functional term that can be seen as a traditional machine code. The two main steps are the compilation of the computation rule by the introduction of continuation functions and the compilation of the environment management using combinators. The advantage of this approach is that we do not have to introduce an abstract machine, which makes correctness proofs much simpler. As far as efficiency is concerned, this approach is promising since many optimizations can be described and formally justified in the functional framework.