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A Parallel Functional Language with First-Class Continuations. Programming Style and Semantics

A Parallel Functional Language with First-Class Continuations. Programming Style and Semantics
A Parallel Functional Language with First-Class Continuations. Programming Style and Semantics
We present an operational semantics for a functional language with first-class continuations and transparent constructs for parallelism fork and pcall. The sequential semantics of programs with first-class continuations is preserved when parallel evaluation is allowed, by verifying whether some expressions have returned a value before applying a continuation. These expressions are the ones that are evaluated before this continuation is applied in a left-to-right sequential order. An implementation is proposed using a notion of higher-order continuation that we call metacontinuation. This semantics is costless when first-class continuations are not used. Several programs also illustrate the programming style that can be adopted in such a language.
173
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8
Moreau, Luc
033c63dd-3fe9-4040-849f-dfccbe0406f8

Moreau, Luc (1995) A Parallel Functional Language with First-Class Continuations. Programming Style and Semantics. Computers and Artificial Intelligence, 14 (2), 173.

Record type: Article

Abstract

We present an operational semantics for a functional language with first-class continuations and transparent constructs for parallelism fork and pcall. The sequential semantics of programs with first-class continuations is preserved when parallel evaluation is allowed, by verifying whether some expressions have returned a value before applying a continuation. These expressions are the ones that are evaluated before this continuation is applied in a left-to-right sequential order. An implementation is proposed using a notion of higher-order continuation that we call metacontinuation. This semantics is costless when first-class continuations are not used. Several programs also illustrate the programming style that can be adopted in such a language.

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Published date: 1995
Organisations: Web & Internet Science

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Local EPrints ID: 252765
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/252765
PURE UUID: 0de09c17-f7e3-4f72-97ee-e4d0dafcd67b
ORCID for Luc Moreau: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-3494-120X

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Date deposited: 20 Mar 2000
Last modified: 14 Mar 2024 05:23

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Author: Luc Moreau ORCID iD

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