Extending a partial evaluator which supports separate compilation

AbstractHitherto all partial evaluators have processed a complete program to produce a complete residual program. We are interested in treating programs as collections of modules which can be processed independently: ‘separate partial evaluation’, so to speak. In this paper we still assume that the original program is processed in its entirety, but we show how to specialise it to the static data bit-by-bit, generating a different module for each bit. When the program to be specialised is an interpreter, this corresponds to specialising it to one module of its object language at a time: each module of the object language gives rise to one module of the residual program