[Haskell-cafe] library on common sub-expression elimination?

oleg at okmij.org oleg at okmij.org
Fri Aug 12 10:00:25 CEST 2011


I guess you mean the function that converts an abstract syntax tree to
a directed acyclic graph (DAG). 

Just for completeness I should mention that if the object language has
effects including non-termination, one has to be careful eliminating
seemingly common expressions. For example, in

	\a i ->
	  if i >= 0 then
             a ! i
          else if i > 0 then
	     a ! i + a ! (i-1)
	  else ....

we see the expression (a ! i) repeated in both branches of
the conditional. Eliminating the `duplicate' by pulling it out

	\a i ->
	  let t = a ! i in
	  if i >= 0 then
             t
          else if i > 0 then
	     t + a ! (i-1)
	  else ....

would be wrong, wouldn't it?

This issue has been extensively investigated in the Fortran compiler
community; Elliott, Finne and de Moor's ``Compiling Embedded Languages''
(JFP 2003) talks about it at length.


The standard technique to detect occurrences of common subexpressions
is so-called hash-consing. There are (OCaml) libraries for it:

  author	= {Jean-Christophe Filli{\^a}tre and Sylvain Conchon},
  title		= {Type-Safe Modular Hash-Consing},
  pages		= {12--19},
  crossref	= "ml2006",
  doi           = "10.1145/1159876.1159880",

The upcoming distilled tutorial at DSL 2011
  http://dsl2011.bordeaux.inria.fr/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2&Itemid=2

will present a Haskell library for hash-consing. The library can work
with the standard Haskell Hash-tables or without them (using Data.Map,
for example). The library does _not_ rely on Stable names and other
internal GHC operations with unstable semantics. The library will find
all common sub-expressions.


Incidentally, despite the Lisp-sounding name, hash-consing was
invented before Lisp. It was described, for the English audience, in
the first volume of Comm. ACM, in 1958:

@Article{	Ershov-hash-consing,
  author	= {A. P. Ershov},
  title		= {On programming of arithmetic operations},
  journal	= "Communications of the {ACM}",
  year		= 1958,
  volume	= 1,
  number	= 8,
  pages		= {3--6},
  doi           ="10.1145/368892.368907",
  url           = "http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=368907"
}

The translation is quite accurate, as far as I could see, but misses
the flowcharts and the diagram of the original paper. This short paper
fully describes what we now call hash tables, hash functions, useful
properties of hash functions, and hash-consing. The article analyzes
the time complexity of the algorithm. Since the algorithm has two
exits, writing programs in the continuation-passing style must have been
familiar back then.


The library to be presented at DSL 2011 unwittingly follows Ershov's
algorithm closely. The library is (hopefully) better described (see
the preface to the English translation of Ershov's paper). Nowadays,
starting a paper with the phrase ``All unexplained terms are those
from [1]'' (where [1] is the single reference) would not be taken
kindly by reviewers.




More information about the Haskell-Cafe mailing list