The transient combinator, higher-order strategies, and the distributed data problem

The distributed data problem is characterized by the desire to bring together semantically related data from syntactically unrelated portions of a term. A strategic combinator called transient and a strategic constant called skip are introduced in the context of a higher-order strategic framework. The notion of traversal is lifted to the higher order as well. The resulting framework allows the manipulation of data to be expressed directly in strategic terms. The impact of this dynamic approach to strategy creation is then explored for several instances of the distributed data problem. Problems considered include three strategic benchmarks as well as two transformations that arise within a class loader for the Java virtual machine.