Online partial evaluation for shift and reset
This paper presents an online partial evaluator for the lambda-calculus with the delimited continuation constructs shift and reset. We first give the semantics of the delimited continuation constructs in two ways: one by writing a continuation passing style (CPS) interpreter and the other by transforming them into CPS. We then combine them to obtain a partial evaluator written in CPS which produces the result in CPS. By transforming this partial evaluator back into a direct style (DS) in two steps, we obtain a DS to DS partial evaluator written in DS. The correctness of the partial evaluator is not yet formally proven. The difficulty comes from the fact that the partial evaluator is written using shift and reset. The method for reasoning about such programs is not yet established. However, the development of the partial evaluator is detailed in the paper to give a degree of confidence that it behaves as we expect.
online partial evaluation delimited continuations direct style (ds) continuation-passing style (cps) cps transformation