Walid Taha, Henning Makholm, John Hughes. Tag Elimination and Jones-Optimality. In Olivier Danvy, Andrzej Filinski, editors, Programs as Data Objects, Second Symposium, PADO 2001, Aarhus, Denmark, May 21-23, 2001, Proceedings. Volume 2053 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 257-275, Springer, 2001. [doi]
Tag elimination is a program transformation for removing unnecessary tagging and untagging operations from automatically generated programs. Tag elimination was recently proposed as having immediate applications in implementations of domain specific languages (where it can give a two-fold speedup), and may provide a solution to the long standing problem of Jones-optimal specialization in the typed setting. This paper explains in more detail the role of tag elimination in the implementation of domain-specific languages, presents a number of significant simplifications and a high-level, higher-order, typed self-applicable interpreter. We show how tag elimination achieves Jones-optimality.