Efficient memo-table management strategies (Q582879)

A large, automatically detectable class of nonlinear functions is defined and their evaluation graphs are characterized. These results are then used to develop space-efficient implementation of memo-functions. We generate a variant of memo-functions which can be used to linearize the time cost of calls of a nonlinear function to itself whilst executing in bounded space. These memo-functions dynamically garbage collect (or reuse) memo-table entries when it is known that such entries will not be useful again. For each nonlinear function a function called the ''table- manager'' function is synthesized by a static analysis of the definition of the nonlinear function. The table-managers delete (or reuse) entries that are guaranteed to be obsolete as a result of any insertion into the memo-tables. In this way they ensure that the size of the tables is minimized. Furthermore, the sizes of the tables for these memo-functions are guaranteed not to exceed a compile-time constant found by the same static analysis which synthesizes the table-managers. The applicability of the method also includes many problems which have been previously solved by applying dynamic programming techniques. An implementation of these memo-functions for the functional language HOPE is also outlined.