Contexts as First-class Objects: an Implementation Based on the Sicstus Prolog System

This work provides a new view of contexts by defining them as primitives data types whose instances can be interpreted in two ways: as structured binding environments and as first-class objects. To achieve such a goal, an implementation is presented in which contexts are completely configured data structures, created by using the SICStus Prolog system support for modular programming. The main advantage of the implementation is to exploit the efficient indirect addressing scheme of SICStus Prolog in order to implement all the contextual binding mechanisms (late binding included) in a uniform way.