article

Adding delimited and composable control to a production programming environment

Authors:

Robert Bruce Findler,

Matthias FelleisenAuthors Info & Claims

ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 42, Issue 9

Pages 165 - 176

https://doi.org/10.1145/1291220.1291178

Published: 01 October 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Operators for delimiting control and for capturing composable continuations litter the landscape of theoretical programming language research. Numerous papers explain their advantages, how the operators explain each other (or don't), and other aspects of the operators' existence. Production programming languages, however, do not support these operators, partly because their relationship to existing and demonstrably useful constructs - such as exceptions and dynamic binding - remains relatively unexplored.

In this paper, we report on our effort of translating the theory of delimited and composable control into a viable implementation for a production system. The report shows how this effort involved a substantial design element, including work with a formal model, as well as significant practical exploration and engineering.

The resulting version of PLT Scheme incorporates the expressive combination of delimited and composable control alongside dynamic-wind, dynamic binding, and exception handling. None of the additional operators subvert the intended benefits of existing control operators, so that programmers can freely mix and match control operators.

References

[1]

Dariusz Biernacki, Olivier Danvy, and Chung-chieh Shan. On the static and dynamic extents of delimited continuations. Science of Computer Programming, 60 (3): 274--297, 2006.

Digital Library

[2]

John Clements and Matthias Felleisen. A tail-recursive machine with stack inspection. ACM Transactions on Computing Systems, 26 (6): 1029--1052, 2004.

Digital Library

[3]

John Clements, Matthew Flatt, and Matthias Felleisen. Modeling an algebraic stepper. In Proc. European Symposium on Programming, number 2028 in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 320--334, April 2001.

Digital Library

[4]

Olivier Danvy and Andrzej Filinski. Abstracting control. In Proc. ACM Conference on Lisp and Functional Programming, pages 151--160, 1990.

Digital Library

[5]

R. Kent Dybvig, Simon Peyton Jones, and Amr Sabry. A monadic framework for delimited continuations. Journal of Functional Programming, 2006. To appear.

[6]

Matthias Felleisen. The theory and practice of first-class prompts. In Proc. ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 180--190, 1988.

Digital Library

[7]

Matthias Felleisen. On the expressive power of programming languages. Science of Compututer Programming, 17 (1-3): 35--75, 1991.

Digital Library

[8]

Andrzej Filinski. Representing monads. In Proc. ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 446--457, 1994.

Digital Library

[9]

Robert Bruce Findler, John Clements, Cormac Flanagan, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Paul Steckler, and Matthias Felleisen. DrScheme: A programming environment for Scheme. Journal of Functional Programming, 12 (2): 159--182, March 2002.

Digital Library

[10]

Matthew Flatt. PLT MzScheme: Language manual. Technical Report PLT-TR2007-1-v370, PLT Scheme, 2007.

[11]

Daniel P. Friedman and Christopher T. Haynes. Constraining control. In Proc. ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 245--254, January 1985.

Digital Library

[12]

Martin Gasbichler and Michael Sperber.Final shift for call/cc: a direct implementation of shift and reset.In Proc. ACM International Conference on Functional Programming, pages 271--282, 2002.

Digital Library

[13]

Martin Gasbichler, Eric Knauel, Michael Sperber, and Richard A. Kelsey. How to add threads to a sequential language without getting tangled up. In Proc. Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, 2003.

[14]

Carl Gunter, Didier R&3233;my, and Jon Riecke. A generalization of exceptions and control in ML-like languages. In Proc. ACM Conference on Functional Programming and Computer Architecture, pages 12--23, 1995.

Digital Library

[15]

David Herman, Aaron Tomb, and Cormac Flanagan. Space-efficient gradual typing. In Proc. Trends in Functional Programming, 2007.

[16]

Robert Hieb and R. Kent Dybvig. Continuations and concurrency. In Proc. ACM Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming, pages 128--136, 1990.

Digital Library

[17]

Robert Hieb, Kent Dybvig, and Claude W. Anderson, III. Subcontinuations. Lisp and Symbolic Computation, 7 (1): 83--110, 1994.

Digital Library

[18]

Richard Kelsey, William Clinger, and J. Rees (Eds.). The revised⁵ report on the algorithmic language Scheme. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, 33 (9), September 1998.

Digital Library

[19]

Richard A. Kelsey and Jonathan Rees. Scheme48, 2007. http://s48.org/

[20]

Oleg Kiselyov. How to remove a dynamic prompt: static and dynamic delimited continuation operators are equally expressible. Technical Report TR611, Indiana University Computer Science, 2005a.

[21]

Oleg Kiselyov. Generic implementation of all four *F* operators: from control0 to shift, 2005. http://okmij.org/ftp/Computation/Continuations.html#generic-control.

[22]

Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan, and Amr Sabry. Delimited dynamic binding. In Proc. ACM International Conference on Functional Programming, pages 26--37, 2006.

Digital Library

[23]

Shriram Krishnamurthi, Peter Walton Hopkins, Jay McCarthy, Paul T. Graunke, Greg Pettyjohn, and Matthias Felleisen. Implementation and use of the PLT Scheme web server. Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation, 2007. To appear.

Digital Library

[24]

James Laird. Exceptions, continuations and macro-expressiveness. In Proc. European Symposium on Programming, pages 133--146, 2002.

Digital Library

[25]

Jacob Matthews, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, and Matthias Felleisen. A visual environment for developing context-sensitive term rewriting systems. In Proc. International Conference on Rewriting Techniques and Applications, volume 3091 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2004.

[26]

Christian Queinnec and Bernard P. Serpette. A dynamic extent control operator for partial continuations. In Proc. ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, pages 174--184, 1991.

Digital Library

[27]

Jon G. Riecke and Hayo Thielecke. Typed exceptions and continuations cannot macro-express each other. In Proc. International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming, pages 635--644, 1999.

Digital Library

[28]

Chung-chieh Shan. Shift to control. In Proc. Workshop on Scheme and Functional Programming, pages 99--107, 2004.

[29]

Dorai Sitaram. Handling control. In Proc. ACM Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 147--155, 1993.

Digital Library

[30]

Dorai Sitaram and Matthias Felleisen. Control delimiters and their hierarchies. Lisp and Symbolic Computation, 3 (1): 67--99, 1990.

Digital Library

[31]

Michael Sperber (Ed.). The revised^5.97 report on the algorithmic language Scheme, 2007.

[32]

Hayo Thielecke. On exceptions versus continuations in the presence of state. In Proc. European Symposium on Programming, pages 397--411, 2000.

Digital Library

Cited By

Kaufmann MPopa BSperber MStevens P(2024)Continuations: What Have They Ever Done for Us? (Experience Report)Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Software Architecture10.1145/3677998.3678223(25-30)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3677998.3678223
de Vilhena PPottier F(2023)A Type System for Effect Handlers and Dynamic LabelsProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-30044-8_9(225-252)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-031-30044-8_9
Garnock-Jones T(2016)From Events to Reactions: A Progress ReportElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.211.5211(46-55)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2016
https://doi.org/10.4204/EPTCS.211.5
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Adding delimited and composable control to a production programming environment
1. Software and its engineering
  1. Software notations and tools
    1. General programming languages
      1. Language features
        Control structures

Recommendations

Adding delimited and composable control to a production programming environment
ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming

Operators for delimiting control and for capturing composable continuations litter the landscape of theoretical programming language research. Numerous papers explain their advantages, how the operators explain each other (or don't), and other aspects ...
Delimited control in OCaml, abstractly and concretely

We describe the first implementation of multi-prompt delimited control operators in OCaml that is direct in that it captures only the needed part of the control stack. The implementation is a library that requires no changes to the OCaml compiler or run-...
Disjunctive Delimited Control
Logic-Based Program Synthesis and Transformation
Abstract
Delimited control is a powerful mechanism for programming language extension which has been recently proposed for Prolog (and implemented in SWI-Prolog). By manipulating the control flow of a program from inside the language, it enables the ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 42, Issue 9

Proceedings of the ICFP '07 conference

September 2007

331 pages

ISSN:0362-1340

EISSN:1558-1160

DOI:10.1145/1291220

Issue’s Table of Contents

ICFP '07: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
October 2007
346 pages
ISBN:9781595938152
DOI:10.1145/1291151
General Chair:
Ralf Hinze
Universität Bonn, Germany
,
Program Chair:
Norman Ramsey
Harvard University, USA

Copyright © 2007 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 01 October 2007

Published in SIGPLAN Volume 42, Issue 9

Check for updates

Qualifiers

Article

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

33
Total Citations
View Citations
430
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)15
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)5

Reflects downloads up to 07 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Kaufmann MPopa BSperber MStevens P(2024)Continuations: What Have They Ever Done for Us? (Experience Report)Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Functional Software Architecture10.1145/3677998.3678223(25-30)Online publication date: 28-Aug-2024
de Vilhena PPottier F(2023)A Type System for Effect Handlers and Dynamic LabelsProgramming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-031-30044-8_9(225-252)Online publication date: 22-Apr-2023
Garnock-Jones T(2016)From Events to Reactions: A Progress ReportElectronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science10.4204/EPTCS.211.5211(46-55)Online publication date: 17-Jun-2016
Philips LDe Koster JDe Meuter WDe Roover C(2016)Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScriptACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/3093335.299324352:3(59-69)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
Philips LDe Koster JDe Meuter WDe Roover CFischer BSchaefer I(2016)Dependence-driven delimited CPS transformation for JavaScriptProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and Experiences10.1145/2993236.2993243(59-69)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2016
Fischer BSchaefer I(2016)Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Generative Programming: Concepts and ExperiencesundefinedOnline publication date: 20-Oct-2016
Takikawa AStrickland TTobin-Hochstadt S(2013)Constraining delimited control with contractsProceedings of the 22nd European conference on Programming Languages and Systems10.1007/978-3-642-37036-6_14(229-248)Online publication date: 16-Mar-2013
Pham COdersky MRacordon DZendra O(2024)Stack-Copying Delimited Continuations for Scala NativeProceedings of the 19th ACM International Workshop on Implementation, Compilation, Optimization of OO Languages, Programs and Systems10.1145/3679005.3685979(2-13)Online publication date: 13-Sep-2024
Moy CDimoulas CFelleisen M(2024)Effectful Software ContractsProceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages10.1145/36329308:POPL(2639-2666)Online publication date: 5-Jan-2024
Ikemori KCong YMasuhara H(2023)Typed Equivalence of Labeled Effect Handlers and Labeled Delimited Control OperatorsProceedings of the 25th International Symposium on Principles and Practice of Declarative Programming10.1145/3610612.3610616(1-13)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents