Compilation as Partial Evaluation of Functor Category Semantics

Our goal is to produce the same compiler as Reynolds 12] via partial evaluation. We develop a continuation semantics for a higher-order, imperative, call-by-name Algol-like language which is based on the functor category semantics of Reynolds and Oles 11], and compile programs via the rst Futumura projection. Our \compilation semantics" is non-standard in some ways (e.g., the meanings of expressions involve the use of temporary storage), although the meanings of terms are recognizably equivalent to their standard denotations. The target language is three address code as in the Dragon book, where the use of memory is explicit rather than implicit as with a stack machine. The presence of store shapes in our denotational description allows actual addresses of program variables to be used in the code, and also yields a very space-eecient method of handling temporary storage in the compilation of expressions. We improve upon Reynolds 12] by introducing jumps and labels in the compilation of conditional statements, thereby eliminating tree-structured machine code and code duplication. Our experiment was inspired by Danvy and Vestergaard 3], and we improve upon their result in that our interpreter is a high-level denotational deenition for the language.