Abstract
The purpose of staged programming in general, and MetaML in particular, is to produce efficient programs. We wish to move beyond programs that compute the “correct” output, to those that also have better control over resources (both space and time). The mechanism for doing this is to use program annotations to control the order of evaluation of terms. It should come as no surprise to those who have studied the λ-calculus that the number of steps in a reduction is strongly influenced by the order of evaluation. Since the number of steps in a reduction relates strongly to the resources it consumes, controlling evaluation order gives programmers better control over resources consumed. MetaML allows programmers to move beyond a fixed evaluation strategy, and to specify precisely the desired evaluation order.
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Sheard, T. (1999). Using MetaML: A Staged Programming Language. In: Swierstra, S.D., Oliveira, J.N., Henriques, P.R. (eds) Advanced Functional Programming. AFP 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1608. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10704973_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10704973_5
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