Clean strictness analyser

[David Clark]

Does Clean still use Eric Knocker's Abstract Reduction to do strictness
analysis in the compiler?

I ask because, as a theoretician, I am curious as to whether there is
still any interest in yet an account of how abstract reduction works.
The account in Eric Knocker's thesis actually dealt with infinitary term

rewriting rather than graph rewriting and he said in the thesis that it
could not be viewed as complete. The earlier account he did with Marko
van Eekelen, Chris Hankin and Eric Goubault also had some short-comings
since they voluntarily excluded graphs with cycles via Union nodes.

I am interested in producing a (possibly long) account of abstract
reduction that uses material from Eric Knocker's thesis, and any other
sources, together with material from my own thesis that to give both an
easy to understand model and a detailed explanation of how the analyser
works.

Is this still of interest or should I just "let sleeping dogs lie "?

- David.




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  Dr David J. Clark      email: djc2@doc.ic.ac.uk
  Dept. of Computing                    room: 428
  Imperial College
  180 Queen's Gate         phone: ++ 171 594 8314
  London SW7 2BZ
  UK                         fax: ++ 171 581 8024
       http://theory.doc.ic.ac.uk:80/~djc2/
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