Compiling control

In the past, a lot of research has been done on obtaining efficient execution of programs which are very readable but very inefficient under the standard computation rule of PROLOG. Control languages have been developed to obtain the desired coroutining behavior. However, execution of the control part causes substantial overhead. In this paper, a novel technique is presented to avoid this overhead. The trace obtained from a coroutining execution of the program is used to synthesize a new program which gives the desired efficiency under the standard PROLOG computation rule. The overhead of executing the control part is eliminated. In a first part, the technique is explained as a manual transformation technique, some examples are shown, and the correctness of the transformation is proven. In a second part, the automation of the technique is sketched, and it is indicated through examples which techniques known in machine learning and program synthesis have proved useful in building an automated system. © 1989.status: publishe