Preface
This thesis is submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for a Ph.D. degree in Com-
puter Science at DIKU, the department of Computer Science, University of Copen-
hagen. It reports work done between February 1992 and May 1994. Supervisor was
Prof. Neil D. Jones, DIKU, and external examiner was Dr. Peter Lee, Carnegie Mellon
University.
The thesis consists of eleven chapters where the first serves as an introduction, and the
last holds the conclusion. Several of the chapters are based on published papers, but they
have either been extensively revised or completely rewritten. The individual chapters are
almost self-contained, but Chapter 2 introduces notations used extensively in the rest of
the thesis.
An overview of the thesis can be found as Section 1.5.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my advisor Neil D. Jones for everything he has done for me and my
academic career. Without Neil I would probably not have written this thesis, and he has
always provided me with inspirations, comments, and insight — sometimes even without
being aware of it. Further, Neil has founded the TOPPS programming language group at
DIKU, and continues to enable contacts to many great people around the world. Without
the TOPPS group, DIKU would not be a place to be.
I would like to thank Peter Lee for his interest in the work, and for useful feedback,
many comments and discussions during his stay at DIKU.
Special thanks are due to Peter Holst Andersen. He has made several of the experimen-
tal results reproduced in this thesis, and spent many hours on correcting (embarrassing)
bugs in my code.
Olivier Danvy deserves thanks for his enthusiasm and the very useful feedback I re-
ceived while wrote the chapter to the Partial Evaluation book. His comments certainly
improved the book chapter, and have also influenced the presentation in this thesis, —-
and my view of computer science.
I would like to thank Robert Gl¨uck for his continued interest in this work, and for
many useful discussions about partial evaluation and optimization. Furthermore, I would
like to thank Carsten Gomard; the paper on speedup analysis was written together with
him.
Warm thanks go to the members of the TOPPS programming language group and its
ii
