A Method for Automatic Program Inversion Based on LR(0) Parsing

Issue title: Program Transformation: Theoretical Foundations and Basic Techniques. Part 1

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Glück, Robert | Kawabe, Masahiko

Affiliations: DIKU, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark. glueck@acm.org | Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan. kawabe@suou.waseda.jp

Note: [] Address for correspondence: DIKU, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, DK-2100 Copenhagen, Denmark

Abstract: We describe a method for automatic program inversion of first-order functional programs based on methods of LR(0) parsing. We formalize the transformation and illustrate it with several example programs. We approach one of the main problems of automatic program inversion - the elimination of nondeterminism - by viewing an inverse program as a context-free grammar. We apply LR-based parsing methods to turn a nondeterministic program into a deterministic program. This improves the efficiency of the inverse programs and greatly expands the application range of our earlier method for program inversion.

Keywords: program inversion, program transformation, LR parsing, functional programming

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 66, no. 4, pp. 367-395, 2005