Functional programming and program transformation with interaction nets

Abstract

In this paper we propose to use Interaction Nets as a formalism for Visual Functional Programming. We consider the use of recursion patterns and introduce a suitable archetype/instantiation mechanism for interaction agents. We also consider program transformation by fusion, a well-known transformation technique, and show that this extends smoothly to our visual programming framework. Examples of applying this technique include transformations of two-pass functions into single-pass ones, and the introduction of accumulations.