Re: Compiling with Continuations/Andrew Appel

nick@dcs.edinburgh.ac.uk mentions:
> Compiling with Continuations
> Andrew Appel
> Cambridge University Press 1992
> ISBN 0-521-41695-7


eifrig@blaze.cs.jhu.edu (Jonathan Eifrig) responds:
> There are good reasons why the methods described may not be a good
> model of compilation for all languages. The continuation-style
> method basically converts the source language into executable code
> for a machine model _with_a_heap_. While this is OK if the
> language you are compiling will need a heap anyways (such as Lisp
> or ML, or any other language where functions are first-class
> objects), it may not be appropriate for simpler languages, like C
> or Algol, for which a simple run-time stack is sufficient.


A GC'd heap is not a requirement for a language implemention where the
compiler uses continations as the intermediate representation.


See "Compilation by Program Transformation" by Richard Kelsey (his PhD
thesis -- YALEU/CDD/RR #702, May 1989 ). He presents a `continuation
passing' compiler with Pascal, Basic, and Scheme front-ends.


If you language includes first class procedures, or if you decide to
represent your control stack with closures (as I believe SML of NJ does),
then you need a heap.


Even when a language needs a heap, the compiler can chose a runtime stack
as the appropriate represention for continuations. The T compiler does
this. A little bit of information on the T compiler is available in


        "Orbit: An Optimizing Compiler for Scheme" by David Kranz et al, in
        Proceedings of the SIGPLAN '86 Symposium on Compiler Construction. pp
        219-233. Published as SIGPLAN Notices 21(7), July 1986.


There is more in Kranz's thesis, a Yale CS tech report --
YALEU/DCS/RR-632, Feb 1988. (Though, I have had no luck in getting tech
reports from Yale.)


-Norman
--

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