A Partial Evaluator, Its Use for Compiling Iterative Statements in Lisp

Abstract

A partial evaluation program for LISP is described, and an application where it has been used. The partial evaluator performs a number of other, related operations such as opening of functions and certain optimizations on programs. The application is based on the fact that we can generate from an interpreter and a partial evaluator the same object code as a corresponding compiler should do. The paper will first formally describe the relationship between an interpreter and a compiler through partial evaluation. The partial evaluator system is then briefly described and finally an experiment is shown where an interpreter for the iterative statement in INTERLISP is partially evaluated.