As the complexity of software increases, researchers and practicioners continue to seek better techniques for engineering the construction of evolution of software. Partial evaluation is an attractive technology for modern software construction since it provides automatic tools for software specialization and is based on rigorous semantic foundations. This book is based on a school held at DIKU Copenhagen, Denmark in summer 1998 during which leading researchers summarized the state of the art in partial evaluation. The lectures presented survey the foundations of partial evaluation in a clear and rigorous manner and practically introduce several existing partial evaluators with numerous examples. The second part of the book is devoted to more sophisticated theoretical aspects, advances systems and applications, and highlights open problems and challenges. The book is ideally suited for advanced courses and for self study.

This book presents the principles and techniques of program specialization — a general method to make programs faster (and possibly smaller) when some inputs can be known in advance. As an illustration, it describes the architecture of Tempo, an offline program specializer for C that can also specialize code at runtime, and provides figures for concrete applications in various domains. Technical details address issues related to program analysis precision, value reification, incomplete program specialization, strategies to exploit specialized program, incremental specialization, and data specialization. The book, that targets both researchers and software engineers, also opens scientific and industrial perspectives.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference CAAP/FASE on Theory and Practice of Software Development (TAPSOFT'97), held in Lille, France, in April 1997. The volume is organized in three parts: The first presents invited contributions, the second is devoted to trees in algebra in programming (CAAP) and the third to formal approaches in software engineering (FASE). The 30 revised full papers presented in the CAAP section were selected from 77 submissions; the 23 revised full papers presented in the FASE section were selected from 79 submissions.