From Natural Semantics to Stratego

Yesterday, Brad Alexander from the University of Adelaide visited the Uithof and gave a talk in the Software Technology Colloquium with the title "From Natural Semantics to Stratego". He explained how he was in the process of converting an implementation of an optimizer for a second-order functional language in natural semantics (using the Centaur system) to a Stratego program using rewrite rules and strategies. As a result of using Stratego, transformations that took hundreds of lines of code could be reduced to only a few. The exciting thing about his presentation was that the basic Stratego techniques he used were quite unexiting. That is, using the basic ideas of separate rewrite rules and parametric strategies he could greatly simplify his optimizer. I hope to see more of his work in the future. Brad was on his way to Estonia to deliver a talk at the AMAST 2006 conference.