Strategic Programming by Model Interpretation and Partial Evaluation

The dominant approach to model-driven development and domain-specific language engineering is to write a translator, or compiler, that defines a strategy for executing the high-level language. In this paper we introduce a new approach to strategic programming by writing interpreters of high-level modeling languages, rather than compilers. This technique is demonstrated by interpreting data models and user interface models. The interpreters are compiled by partial evaluation and deforestation. Although partial evaluation is traditionally applied to functions, we show that it can also be applied to implement data abstractions as objects. Generic functions, for equality and reading, can also be defined as interpreters and partially evaluated. The user interface interpreter illustrates a solution to integrating two modeling languages. The system described here is bootstrapped from Scheme, although the goal is to build a complete software development environment based on model interpretation.