A modal analysis of staged computation

  • Authors:
  • Rowan Davies;Frank Pfenning

  • Affiliations:
  • Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA;Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the ACM (JACM)
  • Year:
  • 2001

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Abstract

We show that a type system based on the intuitionistic modal logic S4 provides an expressive framework for specifying and analyzing computation stages in the context of typed &lgr;-calculi and functional languages. We directly demonstrate the sense in which our l→□e -calculus captures staging, and also give a conservative embeddng of Nielson and Nielson's two-level functional language in our functional language Mini-ML □ , thus proving that binding-time correctness is equivalent to modal correctness on this fragment. In addition, Mini-ML□ can also express immediate evaluation and sharing of code across multiple stages, thus supporting run-time code generation as well as partial evaluation.