Directed Research Project Details

Control Operators: Issues of Expressibility

Abstract

It has been shown that a language with the delimited control operators shift and reset can be translated into a language containing only an undelimited control operator such as callcc and a single mutable storage cell. My Directed Research Project with my advisor, Professor Zena Ariola, studied this encoding and a related one from a language containing callcc into one containing the control and prompt operators. We showed that the translation does not faithfully preserve other control effects that may be present. We developed improved encodings in response to these problems.

In this presentation, I will provide a background on control operators and some of the formal methods used to describe the behavior and translation of these operators. I will then describe the original encodings and our improvements. I will conclude with our observations about control effects and their encoding.