A Semantic Account of Type-Directed Partial Evaluation

We formally characterize partial evaluation of functional programs as a normalization problem in an equational theory, and derive a type-based normalization-by-evaluation algorithm for computing normal forms in this setting. We then establish the correctness of this algorithm using a semantic argument based on Kripke logical relations. For simplicity, the results are stated for a non-strict, purely functional language; but the methods are directly applicable to stating and proving correctness of type-directed partial evaluation in ML-like languages as well.

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