4pm Monday 25th February 2008
Room 2511, JCMB, King's Buildings
Note nonstandard day
Compiling with continuations is out of fashion. In this talk I will argue: compiler writers, give continuations a second chance! Continuation-passing style enjoys many benefits over the currently-fashionable compiler intermediate languages based on ANF (A-normal form), SSA (Static Single Assignment), and monads. In particular, the CPS form is preserved under function inlining (beta-reduction) without the need for commuting conversions. Furthermore, some optimizations are more easily expressed: for example, I will show how contification, the transformation of functions into basic blocks, can be implemented by simple rewriting. I will also describe an extremely efficient graph-based representation of CPS terms that supports linear-time term simplification.