Fixing Letrec: A Faithful Yet Efficient Implementation of Scheme's Recursive Binding Construct

Authors:
Oscar Waddell;Dipanwita Sarkar;R. Kent Dybvig
Affiliations:
Indiana University, Bloomington, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, USA;Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
Venue:
Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation
Year:
2005

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Abstract

A Scheme letrec expression is easily converted into more primitive constructs via a straightforward transformation given in the Revised5 Report. This transformation, unfortunately, introduces assignments that can impede the generation of efficient code. This article presents a more judicious transformation that preserves the semantics of the revised report transformation and also detects invalid references and assignments to left-hand-side variables, yet enables the compiler to generate efficient code. A variant of letrec that enforces left-to-right evaluation of bindings is also presented and shown to add virtually no overhead.