Automatic Construction of Program Transformation Templates

Program transformation by templates (Huet and Lang, 1978) is a technique to improve the efficiency of programs. In this technique, programs are transformed according to a given program transformation template. To enhance the variety of program transformation, it is important to introduce new transformation templates. Up to our knowledge, however, few works discuss about the construction of transformation templates. Chiba et al. (2006) proposed a framework of program transformation by template based on term rewriting and automated verification of its correctness. Based on this framework, we propose a method that automatically constructs transformation templates from similar program transformations. The key idea of our method is a second-order generalization, which is an extension of Plotkin’s firstorder generalization (1969). We give a second-order generalization algorithm and prove the soundness of the algorithm. We then report about an implementation of the generalization procedure and an experiment on the construction of transformation templates.