Abstract

This article describes SCHISM: a self-applicable partial evaluator for a first order subset of Scheme. SCHISM takes place in the framework of mixed computation, and is situated along the line of the MIX project at the University of Copenhagen. The goal is automatically to generate compilers from interpreters by self-application and we have done this with an extensible and directly executable first order subset of Scheme. SCHISM is an open-ended partial evaluator with a syntactic extension mechanism (macro-functions written in full Scheme). Furthermore, the set of primitives is extensible without any modification of the system. Partial evaluation of functional languages relies on the treatment of function calls. We have chosen to use annotations for driving SCHISM to eliminate a call (unfold it) or to keep it residual (specialize it). They are local to each function rather than to each function call. This solves the problem of multiple calls to the same function with different patterns of static and dynamic arguments. Usually two pitfalls are possible in such a case: either to make all of these calls residual and specialize the function exponentially; or to eliminate the calls systematically and possibly start an infinite unfolding. Both are avoided by the use of a filter expression attached to functions. These filters drive SCHISM. In this article we first describe our first order Scheme both with its abstract syntax and informally. Then we analyze the possibilities raised by keeping annotations local to each function. Finally we propose a partial solution to the open problem of reusing the store: the idea is to distinguish compile time and run time in the interpreter itself. In the end some conclusions and issues are proposed.