Control Operators: Issues of Expressibility
Daniel B. Keith
Committee: Zena Ariola (chair), Virginia Lo, Michal Young
Directed Research Project(Apr 2024)
Keywords: control operators; continuations; lambda calculus; operational semantics

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. We study this translation and a related translation from a language containing callcc into one containing the control and prompt operators. We show that the translation does not faithfully preserve other control effects that may be present. We describe new versions of these translations that address these problems. We provide a background on control operators and some of the formalisms used to describe the behavior and translation of these operators.