Explicit polymorphism and CPS conversion

  • Authors:

  • Robert Harper;Mark Lillibridge

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • POPL '93 Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
  • Year:
  • 1993

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Abstract

We study the typing properties of CPS conversion for an extension of F&ohgr; with control operators. Two classes of evaluation strategies are considered, each with call-by-name and call-by-value variants. Under the “standard” strategies, constructor abstractions are values, and constructor applications can lead to non-trivial control effects. In contrast, the “ML-like” strategies evaluate beneath constructor abstractions, reflecting the usual interpretation of programs in languages based on implicit polymorphism. Three continuation passing style sub-languages are considered, one on which the standard strategies coincide, one on which the ML-like strategies coincide, and one on which all strategies coincide. Compositional, type-preserving CPS transformation algorithms are given for the standard strategies, resulting in terms on which all evaluation strategies coincide. This has as a corollary the soundness and termination of well-typed programs under the standard evaluation strategies. A similar result is obtained for the ML-like call-by-name strategy. In contrast, such results are obtained for the call-by-name strategy. In contrast, such results are obtained for the call-by value ML-like strategy only for a restricted sub-language in which constructor abstractions are limited to values.