Graph Reduction

Book excerpt: This volume describes recent research in graph reduction and related areas of functional and logic programming, as reported at a workshop in 1986. The papers are based on the presentations, and because the final versions were prepared after the workshop, they reflect some of the discussions as well. Some benefits of graph reduction can be found in these papers: - A mathematically elegant denotational semantics - Lazy evaluation, which avoids recomputation and makes programming with infinite data structures (such as streams) possible - A natural tasking model for fine-to-medium grain parallelism. The major topics covered are computational models for graph reduction, implementation of graph reduction on conventional architectures, specialized graph reduction architectures, resource control issues such as control of reduction order and garbage collection, performance modelling and simulation, treatment of arrays, and the relationship of graph reduction to logic programming.