Syntactic accidents in program analysis: on the impact of the CPS transformation

  • Authors:

  • Daniel Damian;Olivier Danvy

  • Affiliations:

  • LION Bioscience Ltd., Compass House, 80-82 Newmarket Road, Cambridge CB5 8DZ, UK (e-mail: Daniel.Damian@uk.lionbioscience.com);BRICS, Department of Computer Science, University of Aarhus, Ny Munkegade, Building 540, DK-8000 Aarhus C, Denmark (e-mail: danvy@brics.dk)

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Functional Programming
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

We show that a non-duplicating transformation into Continuation-Passing Style (CPS) has no effect on control-flow analysis, a positive effect on binding-time analysis for traditional partial evaluation, and no effect on binding-time analysis for continuation-based partial evaluation: a monovariant control-flow analysis yields equivalent results on a direct-style program and on its CPS counterpart, a monovariant binding-time analysis yields less precise results on a direct-style program than on its CPS counterpart, and an enhanced monovariant binding-time analysis yields equivalent results on a direct-style program and on its CPS counterpart. Our proof technique amounts to constructing the CPS counterpart of flow information and of binding times. Our results formalize and confirm a folklore theorem about traditional binding-time analysis, namely that CPS has a positive effect on binding times. What may be more surprising is that the benefit does not arise from a standard refinement of program analysis, as, for instance, duplicating continuations. The present study is symptomatic of an unsettling property of program analyses: their quality is unpredictably vulnerable to syntactic accidents in source programs, i.e., to the way these programs are written. More reliable program analyses require a better understanding of the effect of syntactic change.