Normalization and Partial Evaluation of Functional Logic Programs

The functional logic programming paradigm combines the two most important fields of declarative programming, namely functional and logic programming, in an integrated way to allow the concise notation of high-level programs. However, the variety of concepts and conciseness of programs may also impact their efficiency. In this work we employ the powerful optimization technique of partial evaluation to develop a fully automatic program optimizer, the so-called partial evaluator. In particular, we formalize the normalization of programs during compilation, establish a formal notation of the evaluation process, develop a formal partial evaluation scheme and prove its correctness and termination, and implement a working partial evaluator which shows impressive results.