Recovering Sequentiality in Functional-Logic Programs

EEcient code generation in implementations of functional logic languages relies on the sequentiality of the program rules | existence of an optimal evaluation order for arguments. Parallel evaluation of arguments in the presence of free variables is out of the question due to the possibility of backtracking and sharing of these variables among diierent arguments. In this paper we show that the lack of sequentiality is often syntactic rather than semantic and that a clever use of type information and strictness analysis can enable a compiler to generate sequential code from most programs.