A framework for point-free program transformation

• Author(s): Cunha, Alcino ; Pinto, Jorge Sousa ; Proença, Alberto José
• Date: 2006
• Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/1822/14350
• Origin: RepositóriUM - Universidade do Minho
• Subject(s): Functional programming; Point-free transform
• Document Type: Article
• Language: English

Description

The subject of this paper is functional program transformation in the so-called point-free style. By this we mean first translating programs to a form consisting only of categorically-inspired combinators, algebraic data types defined as fixed points of functors, and implicit recursion through the use of type-parameterized recursion patterns. This form is appropriate for reasoning about programs equationally, but difficult to actually use in practice for programming. In this paper we present a collection of libraries and tools developed at Minho with the aim of supporting the automatic conversion of programs to point-free (embedded in Haskell), their manipulation and rule-driven simplification, and the (limited) automatic application of fusion for program transformation.