Abstract continuations: a mathematical semantics for handling full jumps

  • Authors:
  • Matthias Felleisen;Mitch Wand;Daniel Friedman;Bruce Duba

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Rice University, Houston, TX;College of Computer Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA;Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN;Computer Science Department, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

  • Venue:
  • LFP '88 Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on LISP and functional programming
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

Continuation semantics is the traditional mathematical formalism for specifying the semantics of non-local control operations. Modern Lisp-style languages, however, contain advanced control structures like full functional jumps and control delimiters for which continuation semantics is insufficient. We solve this problem by introducing an abstract domain of rests of computations with appropriate operations. Beyond being useful for the problem at hand, these abstract continuations turn out to have applications in a much broader context, e.g., the explication of parallelism, the modeling of control facilities in parallel languages, and the design of new control structures.