How to Remove a Dynamic Prompt-static and dynamic delimited continuation operators are equally expr.pdfVIP

Technical Report No. 611 How to remove a dynamic prompt: static and dynamic delimited continuation operators are equally expressible by Oleg Kiselyov? March 2005 Computer Science Department Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana 47405-7104 ?Collaborating with Profs. Daniel P. Friedman and Amr A. Sabry on logical programming systems Abstract We show how to remove a dynamic prompt (aka reset) and thus to turn so-called static delimited continuation operators (shift/reset) into dynamic ones: control, control0, shift0. Our technique ex- tends the continuation captured by shift by composing it with the previous fragments of the ‘stack’. Composition of context fragments can be done via regular functional composition. We thus demon- strate that all the above delimited continuation operators are macro- expressible in term of each other — without capturing undelimited continuations and without using mutable state. Furthermore, the op- erators shift, control, control0, shift0 are the members of a sin- gle parameterized family, and the standard CPS is sufficient to express their denotational semantics. We give the simplest Scheme implementation of the dynamic con- trol operators. We give a formal simulation proof that control real- ized through shift indeed has its standard reduction semantics. 1 Introduction There have been proposed a number of delimited continuation operators, which are concisely surveyed in [8]. The most well-known operators are control/prompt (which were historically the first) and shift/reset. It is of considerable interest both to the implementors and the users to establish the relationship among various control operators. In one direction, it is obvi- ous that shift/reset is macro-expressible [5] in terms of control/prompt. Whether control/prompt and similar operators (shift0, splitter, spawn, cupto, etc.) can be macro-expressed in terms of shift/reset has been for a long time an open question [1]. The so-called static delimited continuation operators