Optimal Code Generation for Expression Trees: An Application of BURS Theory

Abstract

A Rewrite System is a collection of rewrite rules of the form α β where α and β are tree patterns. A rewrite system can be extended by associating a cost with each rewrite rule, and by defining the cost of a rewrite sequence as the sum of the costs of all the rewrite rules in the sequence. The REACHABILITY problem for a rewrite system R is, given an input tree T and a fixed goal tree G, to determine if there exists a rewrite sequence in R, rewriting T into G and, if so, to obtain one such sequence. The C-REACHABILITY problem is similar except that the obtained sequence must have minimal cost among all those sequences writing T into G.