Frequently, it is convenient to describe a program in terms of the normal situations in which it will be used, even if such a description does not describe the its complete behavior in all circumstances. This paper surveys ...

Lifting is a well known technique in resolution theorem proving, logic programming, and term rewriting. In this paper we formulate lifting as an efficiency-motivated program transformation applicable to a wide variety ...

We exhibit programs that illustrate the power of Lisp as a language for expressing the design and organization of computational systems. The examples are chosen to highlight the importance of abstraction in program ...

Scheme86 is a computer system designed to interpret programs written in the Scheme dialect of Lisp. A specialized architecture, coupled with new techniques for optimizing register management in the interpreter, allows ...

A frustrating aspect of the frequent changes to large VLSI CAD systems is that so little of the old available programs can be reused. It takes too much time and effort to find the reusable pieces and recast them for ...

In this paper we describe {\\it syntactic closures}. Syntactic closures address the scoping problems that arise when writing macros. We discuss some issues raised by introducing syntactic closures into the macro ...