Binding time analysis for high order untyped functional languages

Abstract

When some inputs of a program are known at compile-time, certain expressions can be processed statically; this is the basis of the notion of partial evaluation. Identifying these early computations can be determined independently of the actual values of the input by a static analysis called binding time analysis. Then, to process a program, one simply follows the binding time information: evaluate compile-time expressions and defer the others to run-time.