The Generation of a Higher-Order Online Partial Evaluator

We address the problem of generating an online partial evaluator for a higher-order, functional language from an appropriate interpreter using a state-of-the-art ooine partial evaluator. To ensure termination of the generated online spe-cializer the interpreter computes a self-embedding property on closure values and data structures. This guarantees termination whenever there is no static loop in the program to be specialized. We obtain a transformer for higher-order removal and higher-order arity raising (redundancy elimination) for free, by running the online specializer on a program with completely dynamic inputs.