Generalising Tree Traversals to DAGs - Exploiting Sharing Without the Pain
Paper in proceeding, 2015

We present a recursion scheme based on attribute grammars that can be transparently applied to trees and acyclic graphs. Our recursion scheme allows the programmer to implement a tree traversal and then apply it to compact graph representations of trees instead. The resulting graph traversals avoid recomputation of intermediate results for shared nodes -- even if intermediate results are used in different contexts. Consequently, this approach leads to asymptotic speedup proportional to the compression provided by the graph representation. In general, however, this sharing of intermediate results is not sound. Therefore, we complement our implementation of the recursion scheme with a number of correspondence theorems that ensure soundness for various classes of traversals. We illustrate the practical applicability of the implementation as well as the complementing theory with a number of examples.

graph traversal

haskell

sharing

attribute grammars

Author

Patrick Bahr

University of Copenhagen

Emil Axelsson

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Technology (Chalmers)

Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop on Partial Evaluation and Program Manipulation

27-38
978-1-4503-3297-2 (ISBN)

Areas of Advance

Information and Communication Technology

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

DOI

10.1145/2678015.2682539

ISBN

978-1-4503-3297-2

More information

Latest update

5/8/2018 1