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The essence of compiling with continuations

Authors:

Cormac Flanagan,

Matthias FelleisenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 28, Issue 6

Pages 237 - 247

https://doi.org/10.1145/173262.155113

Published: 01 June 1993 Publication History

Abstract

In order to simplify the compilation process, many compilers for higher-order languages use the continuation-passing style (CPS) transformation in a first phase to generate an intermediate representation of the source program. The salient aspect of this intermediate form is that all procedures take an argument that represents the rest of the computation (the “continuation”). Since the nai¨ve CPS transformation considerably increases the size of programs, CPS compilers perform reductions to produce a more compact intermediate representation. Although often implemented as a part of the CPS transformation, this step is conceptually a second phase. Finally, code generators for typical CPS compilers treat continuations specially in order to optimize the interpretation of continuation parameters.

A thorough analysis of the abstract machine for CPS terms show that the actions of the code generator invert the nai¨ve CPS translation step. Put differently, the combined effect of the three phases is equivalent to a source-to-source transformation that simulates the compaction phase. Thus, fully developed CPS compilers do not need to employ the CPS transformation but can achieve the same results with a simple source-level transformation.

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Index Terms

The essence of compiling with continuations
1. Mathematics of computing
  1. Continuous mathematics
    1. Calculus
      1. Lambda calculus
  2. Mathematical analysis
    1. Calculus
      1. Lambda calculus
2. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. Compilers
      1. Source code generation

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 28, Issue 6

June 1993

313 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/173262

Editor:
Richard Wexelblat
IDA/CSED, Alexandria, VA

Issue’s Table of Contents

PLDI '93: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation
August 1993
313 pages
ISBN:0897915984
DOI:10.1145/155090
Editor:
Robert Cartwright
Rice Univ., Houston, TX

Copyright © 1993 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 01 June 1993

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 28, Issue 6

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610408
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