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Thunks and the lambda-Calculus (Extended Version)

BRICS Report Series

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Title Thunks and the lambda-Calculus (Extended Version)
 
Creator Hatcliff, John
Danvy, Olivier
 
Description Plotkin, in his seminal article Call-by-name, call-by-value and the lambda-calculus, formalized evaluation strategies and simulations using operational semantics and continuations. In particular, he showed howcall-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 Cn and Cv, by deriving Cn as the composition of our thunk-based simulation T and of Cv^+ - an extension of Cv handling thunks. Almost all of the correctness properties of Cn follow from the properties of T and Cv^+ . This simplifies reasoning about call-by-name continuation-passing style. We also give several applications involving factoring continuation-based transformations using thunks.
 
Publisher Aarhus University
 
Date 1997-01-07
 
Type info:eu-repo/semantics/article
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
 
Format application/pdf
 
Identifier https://tidsskrift.dk/brics/article/view/18797
10.7146/brics.v4i7.18797
 
Source BRICS Report Series; No 7 (1997): RS-07 Thunks and the lambda-Calculus (Extended Version)
BRICS Report Series; Nr. 7 (1997): RS-07 Thunks and the lambda-Calculus (Extended Version)
1601-5355
0909-0878
 
Language eng
 
Relation https://tidsskrift.dk/brics/article/view/18797/16442