COMPILER GENERATION BY PARTIAL EVALUATION - A CASE-STUDY

It was known as long ago as 1971 in Japan and Russia that the program transformation principle called partial evaluation or program specialization has intimate connections with compiling. In particular a program specializer can be used to compile, given as input data an interpretative definition of a programming language. Further, a program specializer can generate a compiler and even a compiler generator-provided it is self-applicable. The purpose of this paper is to show by a concrete example that certain rather simple techniques are sufficient to construct a fully automatic and nontrivial program specializer for a simple imperative language. Further, the specializer is self-applicable, with the consequence that it can both compile and generate stand-alone compilers.