Techniques for Simplifying the Visualization of Graph Reduction

Abstract

Space and time problems still occasionally dog the functional programmer, despite increasingly efficient implementations and the recent spate of useful profiling tools. There is a need for a model of program reduction that relates directly to the user’s code and has a simple graphical representation. Naïve graph reduction provides this. We address the problems of displaying a series of program graphs which may be long, and the elements of which may be large and complex. We offer a scheme for compacting an individual display by creating a quotient graph through defining equivalence classes, and a similar scheme for reducing the number of graphs to show. A metalanguage to allow the user to define compaction rules gives the model flexibility. A prototype system exists in a Haskell implementation.

This work was supported by a SERC grant to the first author and is described further in her D.Phil. thesis [3].