Re: Compiling with Continuations/Andrew Appel

Compiling with continuations has been applied succesfully to the
compilation of Prolog: it is based on transforming a Prolog program to an
equivalent continuation based Prolog program (a binary program) and
compiling that the usual way. Performance is always close to stack-based
compiled programs and sometimes better. It lends itself to optimizations
which are more difficult to grasp in non-binary programs. See for
instance:


'Elementary Logic Programs' P. Tarau, M. Boyer Proceedings of PLILP'90,
pp. 159-173, (eds) P. Deransart & J. Maluszynski, Springer-Verlag 1990


'Implementation of Prolog as binary definite Programs' Bart Demoen, Andre
Marien to appear in the Proceedings of the second Russian Conference on
Logic Programming (also available as CW-report 129) in the same Russian
Proceedings, there is another paper from P. Tarau


Mats Carlsson (SICS) told me that his Prolog to Lisp compiler was based on
the same principle - back in the beginning of the eighties.


Bart Demoen
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