Quick question regarding indirection cells...

[Marco Kesseler]

>It's a good question!  No, I don't know of any earlier work
>on indirections.  I regard what I wrote in my book as a writing-down
>of folk-lore, certainly not a formal treatment.  David Lester did
>prove some properties of graph reduction in his thesis (Oxford),
>though not this one I think.  There's quite a bit more about
>indirections and indirection chains in my other book (also out of
>print, but available online) in the context of the TIM machine
>where the issue of indirections is especially delicate.
>
>Maybe some Clean people know of other work.  Certainly, a lot
>of work on the foundations of graph reduction has taken place
>in that community.

Pehaps they do, but note that the Clean implementation avoids
generating indirection nodes alltogether. Nodes get overwritten
by their result, not by indirections to it.

Marco


---------------------------------------------

Marco Kesseler
Oce-Technologies B.V.
St. Urbanusweg 43, Venlo, The Netherlands
P.O. Box 101, 5900 MA Venlo, The Netherlands
telephone +31 77 359 5158
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e-mail    mke@oce.nl