Declarative Program Transformation: A Deforestation Case-Study

Software engineering has to reconcile modularity with efficiency. One way to grapple with this dilemma is to automatically transform a modular-specified program into an efficient-implementable one. This is the aim of deforestation transformations which get rid of intermediate data structure constructions that occur when two functions are composed. Beyond classical compile time optimization, these transformations are undeniable tools for generic programming and software component specialization.