Open AccessBack to Direct Style II: First-Class Continuations
Author(s) -
Olivier Danvy,
Julia Lawall
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
brics report series
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1601-5355
pISSN - 0909-0878
DOI - 10.7146/brics.v3i20.19982
Subject(s) - continuation , style (visual arts) , transformation (genetics) , class (philosophy) , operator (biology) , computer science , mathematics , programming language , artificial intelligence , history , biochemistry , chemistry , archaeology , repressor , transcription factor , gene
The direct-style transformation aims at mapping continuation-passing programs back to direct style, be they originally written in continuation-passing style or the result of the continuation-passing-style transformation. In this paper, we continue to investigate the direct-style transformation by extending it to programs with first-class continuations. First-class continuations break the stack-like discipline of continuations in that they are sent results out of turn. We detect them syntactically through an analysis of continuation-passing terms. We conservatively extend the direct-style transformation towards call-by-value functional terms (the pure lambda-calculus) by translating the declaration of a first-class continuation using the control operator call/cc, and by translating an occurrence of a first-class continuation using the control operator throw. We prove that our extension and the corresponding extended continuation-passing-style transformation are inverses.