A Unified Framework for Partial Evaluation and Program Slicing

The emphasis on code re-usability in component-based software development has resulted in degradation of system performance. Component specialization techniques have been proposed to overcome this problem. They mainly specialize components wrt contents of component interfaces. This requires specialization to be performed in either a forward or backward direction. The current state of the art applies partial evaluation for forward specialization, but applies backward slicing for backward specialization. In this research, we investigate the relationship between partial evaluation and program slicing in general. We establish a theoretical unified framework in which we can cast both transformations. This framework captures the essence of these two techniques and enables a consistent treatment of program specialization in both forward and backward directions. This framework also make it possible to develop new specialization through cross-fertilization between existing program slicing and partial evaluation techniques.