Program transformation

About: Program transformation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2468 publications have been published within this topic receiving 73415 citations.

Incremental synthesis of fault-tolerant real-time programs

Abstract: In this paper, we focus on the problem of automated addition of fault tolerance to an existing fault-intolerant real-time program. We consider three levels of fault-tolerance, namely nonmasking, failsafe, and masking, based on safety and liveness properties satisfied in the presence of faults. More specifically, a nonmasking (respectively, failsafe, masking) program satisfies liveness (respectively, safety, both safety and liveness) in the presence of faults. For failsafe and masking fault-tolerance, we consider two additional levels, soft and hard, based on satisfaction of timing constraints in the presence of faults. We present a polynomial time algorithm (in the size of the input program's region graph) that adds bounded-time recovery from an arbitrary given set of states to another arbitrary set of states. Using this algorithm, we propose a sound and complete synthesis algorithm that transforms a fault-intolerant real-time program into a nonmasking fault-tolerant program. Furthermore, we introduce sound and complete algorithms for adding soft/hard-failsafe fault-tolerance. For reasons of space, our results on addition of soft/hard-masking fault-tolerance are presented in a technical report.

Embedding a Hardware Description Language in Template Haskell

Abstract: Hydra is a domain-specific language for designing digital circuits, which is implemented by embedding within Haskell. Many features required for hardware specification fit well within functional languages, leading in many cases to a perfect embedding. There are some situations, including netlist generation and software logic probes, where the DSL does not fit exactly within the host functional language. A new solution to these problems is based on program transformations performed automatically by metaprograms in Template Haskell.

Towards banishing the cut from Prolog

Abstract: Logic programs can often be inefficient. The usual solution to this problem has been to return some control to the user in the form of impure language features like cut. The authors argue that it is not necessary to resort to such impure features for efficiency. This point is illustrated by considering how most of the common uses of cut can be eliminated from Prolog source programs, relying on static analysis to generate them at compile time. Three common situations where the cut is used are considered. Static analysis techniques are given to detect such situations, and applicable program transformations are described. Two language constructs, firstof and oneof, for situations involving don't-care nondeterminism, are suggested. These constructs have better declarative readings than the cut and extend better to parallel evaluation strategies. Together, these proposals result in a system where users need rely much less on cuts for efficiency, thereby promoting a purer programming style without sacrificing efficiency. >

Relating Accumulative and Non-accumulative Functional Programs

Abstract: We study the problem to transform functional programs, which intensively use append functions (like inefficient list reversal), into programs, which use accumulating parameters instead (like efficient list reversal). We give an (automatic) transformation algorithm for our problem and identify a class of functional programs, namely restricted 2- modular tree transducers, to which it can be applied. Moreover, since we get macro tree transducers as transformation result and since we also give the inverse transformation algorithm, we have a new characterization for the class of functions induced by macro tree transducers.