Fortran Program Specialization

. We have developed and implemented a partial evaluator for a subset of Fortran 77. A partial evaluator is a tool for program transformation which takes as input a general program and a part of its input, and produces as output a specialized program. The goal is efficiency: a specialized program often runs an order of magnitude faster than the general program. The partial evaluator is based on the off-line approach and uses a binding-time analysis prior to the specialization phase. The source language includes multi-dimensional arrays, procedures and functions, as well as global storage. The system is presented and experimental results are given. 1 Introduction Partial evaluation is a principle for program transformation which reconciles generality with efficiency by providing automated specialization and optimization of programs. It has proven its usefulness in numerous areas ranging from the specialization of scientific computations [7,8,6] to specialization of general scanners and ..