Deforestation (computer science)

In the theory of programming languages in computer science, deforestation (also known as fusion) is a program transformation to eliminate tree structures.

The term "deforestation" was originally coined by Philip Wadler in his paper "Deforestation: transforming programs to eliminate trees"^[1].

Deforestation is typically applied to programs in functional programming languages, particularly non-strict programming languages such as Haskell. One particular algorithm for deforestation, shortcut deforestation^[2], is implemented in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler.^[3]

See also

• Hylomorphism (computer science)

References

1. ^ Wadler, Philip (1990). "Deforestation: transforming programs to eliminate trees". Theoretical Computer Science 73 (2): 231–248. doi:10.1016/0304-3975(90)90147-A. http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/papers/deforest/deforest.ps. 
2. ^ Gill, Andrew; John Launchbury, Simon Peyton Jones (1993). "A short cut to deforestation". Proc. Conf. on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture. pp. 223–232. 
3. ^ Peyton Jones, Simon; Andrew Tolmach, C.A.R. Hoare (2001). "Playing by the rules: rewriting as a practical optimization technique in GHC". Proc. ACM/SIGPLAN Haskell Workshop.