Siskind, Jeffrey Mark and Pearlmutter, Barak A. (2007) First-Class Nonstandard Interpretations by Opening Closures. Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages. pp. 71-76.

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Abstract

We motivate and discuss a novel functional programming construct that allows convenient modular run-time nonstandard interpretation via reflection on closure environments. This map-closure construct encompasses both the ability to examine the contents of a closure environment and to construct a new closure with a modified environment. From the user’s perspective, map-closure is a powerful and useful construct that supports such tasks as tracing, security logging, sandboxing, error checking, profiling, code instrumentation and metering, run-time code patching, and resource monitoring. From the implementor’s perspective, map-closure is analogous to call/cc. Just as call/cc is a non-referentiallytransparent mechanism that reifies the continuations that are only implicit in programs written in direct style, map-closure is a nonreferentially- transparent mechanism that reifies the closure environments that are only implicit in higher-order programs. Just as CPS conversion is a non-local but purely syntactic transformation that can eliminate references to call/cc, closure conversion is a non-local but purely syntactic transformation that can eliminate references to map-closure. We show how the combination of map-closure and call/cc can be used to implement set! as a procedure definition and a local macro transformation.

Item Type:	Article
Keywords:	Referential transparency; Lambda lifting; Design languages;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute
Item ID:	2051
Depositing User:	Barak Pearlmutter
Date Deposited:	14 Jul 2010 15:45
Journal or Publication Title:	Proceedings of the 34th annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT symposium on Principles of programming languages
Publisher:	Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Refereed:	No
URI:	http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm?coll=portal...
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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