A modular fully‐lazy lambda lifter in Haskell
An important step in many compilers for functional languages is lambda lifting. In his thesis,
Hughes showed that by doing lambda lifting in a particular way, a useful property called full
laziness can be preserved. Full laziness has been seen as intertwined with lambda lifting
ever since. We show that, on the contrary, full laziness can be regarded as a completely
separate process to lambda lifting, thus making it easy to use different lambda lifters
following a full‐laziness transformation, or to use the full‐laziness transformation in …
Hughes showed that by doing lambda lifting in a particular way, a useful property called full
laziness can be preserved. Full laziness has been seen as intertwined with lambda lifting
ever since. We show that, on the contrary, full laziness can be regarded as a completely
separate process to lambda lifting, thus making it easy to use different lambda lifters
following a full‐laziness transformation, or to use the full‐laziness transformation in …
Abstract
An important step in many compilers for functional languages is lambda lifting. In his thesis, Hughes showed that by doing lambda lifting in a particular way, a useful property called full laziness can be preserved. Full laziness has been seen as intertwined with lambda lifting ever since.
We show that, on the contrary, full laziness can be regarded as a completely separate process to lambda lifting, thus making it easy to use different lambda lifters following a full‐laziness transformation, or to use the full‐laziness transformation in compilers which do not require lambda lifting.
On the way, we present the complete code for our modular fully‐lazy lambda lifter, written in the HASKELL functional programming language.