Comparison of Deforestation Techniques for Functional Programs and for Tree Transducers

We compare transformations for the elimination of intermediate results in first-order functional programs. We choose the well known deforestation technique of Wadler and composition techniques from the theory of tree transducers, of which the implementation of functional programs yet does not take advantage. We identify syntactic classes of function definitions for which both techniques deliver equally efficient results and for which one technique is more powerful than the other. In particular, this paper offers a technique that eliminates intermediate results for certain kinds of function definitions, for which deforestation fails.

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