CPS Transformation of Flow Information, Part II: Administrative Reductions

We characterize the impact of a linear beta-reduction on the result of a control-flow analysis. (By ``a linear beta-reduction'' we mean the beta-reduction of a linear lambda-abstraction, i.e., of a lambda-abstraction whose parameter occurs exactly once in its body.) As a corollary, we consider the administrative reductions of a Plotkin-style transformation into continuation-passing style (CPS), and how they affect the result of a constraint-based control-flow analysis and in particular the least element in the space of solutions. We show that administrative reductions preserve the least solution. Since we know how to construct least solutions, preservation of least solutions solves a problem that was left open in Palsberg and Wand's paper ``CPS Transformation of Flow Information.'' Therefore, together, Palsberg and Wand's article ``CPS Transformation of Flow Information'' and the present article show how to map, in linear time, the least solution of the flow constraints of a program into the least solution of the flow constraints of the CPS counterpart of this program, after administrative reductions. Furthermore, we show how to CPS transform control-flow information in one pass. Superseded by BRICS-RS-02-36

On One-Pass CPS Transformations

We bridge two distinct approaches to one-pass CPS transformations, i.e., CPS transformations that reduce administrative redexes at transformation time instead of in a post-processing phase. One approach is compositional and higher-order, and is due to Appel, Danvy and Filinski, and Wand, building on Plotkin's seminal work. The other is non-compositional and based on a syntactic theory of the lambda-calculus, and is due to Sabry and Felleisen. To relate the two approaches, we use Church encoding, Reynolds's defunctionalization, and an implementation technique for syntactic theories, refocusing, developed in the second author's PhD thesis

A Simple CPS Transformation of Control-Flow Information

We build on Danvy and Nielsen's first-order program transformation into continuation-passing style (CPS) to design a new CPS transformation of flow information that is simpler and more efficient than what has been presented in previous work. The key to simplicity and efficiency is that our CPS transformation constructs the flow information in one go, instead of first computing an intermediate result and then exploiting it to construct the flow information. More precisely, we show how to compute control-flow information for CPS-transformed programs from control-flow information for direct-style programs and vice-versa. As a corollary, we confirm that CPS transformation has no effect on the control-flow information obtained by constraint-based control-flow analysis. The transformation has immediate applications in assessing the effect of the CPS transformation over other analyses such as, for instance, binding-time analysis

A First-Order One-Pass CPS Transformation

We present a new transformation of call-by-value lambda-terms into continuation-passing style (CPS). This transformation operates in one pass and is both compositional and first-order. Because it operates in one pass, it directly yields compact CPS programs that are comparable to what one would write by hand. Because it is compositional, it allows proofs by structural induction. Because it is first-order, reasoning about it does not require the use of a logical relation. This new CPS transformation connects two separate lines of research. It has already been used to state a new and simpler correctness proof of a direct-style transformation, and to develop a new and simpler CPS transformation of control-flow information

On One-Pass CPS Transformations

We bridge two distinct approaches to one-pass CPS transformations, i.e., CPS transformations that reduce administrative redexes at transformation time instead of in a post-processing phase. One approach is compositional and higher-order, and is independently due to Appel, Danvy and Filinski, and Wand, building on Plotkin's seminal work. The other is non-compositional and based on a reduction semantics for the lambda-calculus, and is due to Sabry and Felleisen. To relate the two approaches, we use three tools: Reynolds's defunctionalization and its left inverse, refunctionalization; a special case of fold-unfold fusion due to Ohori and Sasano, fixed-point promotion; and an implementation technique for reduction semantics due to Danvy and Nielsen, refocusing. This work is directly applicable to transforming programs into monadic normal form

Syntactic Accidents in Program Analysis: On the Impact of the CPS Transformation

We show that a non-duplicating CPS transformation has no effect on control-flow analysis and that it has a positive effect on binding-time analysis: a monovariant control-flow analysis yields equivalent results on a direct-style programand on its CPS counterpart, and a monovariant binding-time analysis yields more precise results on a CPS program than on its direct-style counterpart. Our proof technique amounts to constructing the continuation-passing style (CPS) counterpart of flow information and of binding times.Our results confirm a folklore theorem about binding-time analysis, namelythat CPS has a positive effect on binding times. What may be more surprising is that this benefit holds even if contexts or continuations are not duplicated. 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

On the Static and Dynamic Extents of Delimited Continuations

We show that breadth-first traversal exploits the difference between the static delimited-control operator shift (alias S) and the dynamic delimited-control operator control (alias F). For the last 15 years, this difference has been repeatedly mentioned in the literature but it has only been illustrated with one-line toy examples. Breadth-first traversal fills this vacuum. We also point out where static delimited continuations naturally give rise to the notion of control stack whereas dynamic delimited continuations can be made to account for a notion of `control queue.'

A Foundation for Embedded Languages

Recent work on embedding object languages into Haskell use ``phantom types'' (i.e., parameterized types whose parameter does not occur on the right-hand side of the type definition) to ensure that the embedded object-language terms are simply typed. But is it a safe assumption that only simply-typed terms can be represented in Haskell using phantom types? And conversely, can all simply-typed terms be represented in Haskell under the restrictions imposed by phantom types? In this article we investigate the conditions under which these assumptions are true: We show that these questions can be answered affirmatively for an idealized Haskell-like language and discuss to which extent Haskell can be used as a meta-language