Bibliographic Details

Main Authors:	Hatcliff, John 1966- (Author), Danvy, Olivier (Author)
Format:	Book
Language:	English
Published:	København 1995
Series:	Datalogisk Institut <København>: DIKU-Rapport 1995,3
Subjects:	Functional programming languages Lambda calculus
Abstract:	Abstract: "In his paper, Call-by-name, call-by-value and the [lambda]-calculus, Plotkin formalized evaluation strategies and simulations using operational semantics and continuations. In particular, he showed how call-by-name evaluation could be simulated under call-by-value evaluation and vice versa. Since Algol 60, however, call-by-name is both implemented and simulated with thunks rather than with continuations. We recast this folk theorem in Plotkin's setting, and show that thunks, even though they are simpler than continuations, are sufficient for establishing all the correctness properties of Plotkin's call-by-name simulation. Furthermore, we establish a new relationship between Plotkin's two continuation-based simulations simulations C[subscript n] and C[subscript v], by deriving C[subcript n] as the composition of our thunk-based simulation T and of C+[subscript v] -- an extension of C[subscript v] handling thunks. Almost all of the correctness properties of C[subscript n] follow from the properties of T and C+[subscript v]. This simplifies reasoning about call-by-name continuation-passing style. We also give several applications involving factoring continuation-based transformations using thunks."
Physical Description:	44 S.