AN EFFICIENT COMPILATION OF LAMBDA EXPRESSIONS TO DIRECTOR STRING GRAPHS

Abstract

A speed in computation can be harnessed by allowing parallel evaluation on Decentralized Control Flow architectures. Lambda calculus based functional languages are a potential candidate for programming such machines. This thesis describes the development of an efficient compilation scheme which compiles lambda expressions to binary trees of application nodes where each application is associated with a string of directors. Each director is associated with a level of abstraction. Such trees known as Director string graphs are capable of being executed on reduction machines like CTDNet, ZAPP etc. A software LBDCOMP has been developed on IBM-PC which implements the compilation scheme. Several lambda expressions have been compiled to prove the validity of the scheme and the performance of the software.