Discovering applications of higher order functions through proof planning

The close association between higher order functions (HOFs) and algorithmic skeletons is a promising source of automatic parallelisation of programs. A theorem proving approach to discovering HOFs in functional programs is presented. Our starting point is proof planning, an automated theorem proving technique in which high-level proof plans are used to guide proof search. We use proof planning to identify provably correct transformation rules that introduce HOFs. The approach has been implemented in the ? Clam proof planner and tested on a range of examples. The work was conducted within the context of a parallelising compiler for Standard ML. BCS © 2005.