Lambda the Ultimate

I just arrived in Montreal. I've been too busy the past few weeks to post anything sooner, but I'd love to meet up with other LtUers in the area this week... (I assume any actual human can figure out easily enough how to get in touch with me.)

Olivier Danvy, Kevin Millikin and Lasse R. Nielsen. On One-Pass CPS Transformations. March 2007.

We bridge two distinct approaches to one-pass CPS transformations, i.e., CPS transformations that reduce administrative redexes at transformation time instead of in a post-processing phase. One approach is compositional and higher-order, and is independently due to Appel, Danvy and Filinski, and Wand, building on Plotkin's seminal work. The other is non-compositional and based on a reduction semantics for the lambda-calculus, and is due to Sabry and Felleisen. To relate the two approaches, we use three tools: Reynolds's defunctionalization and its left inverse, refunctionalization; a special case of fold-unfold fusion due to Ohori and Sasano, fixed-point promotion; and an implementation technique for reduction semantics due to Danvy and Nielsen, refocusing.

This work is directly applicable to transforming programs into monadic normal form.

Also in JFP 17:793-812 (2007).