Typed Closure Conversion
| Title: | Typed Closure Conversion |
| Author: |
Harper, Robert; Minamide, Yasuhiko; Morrisett, Greg
Note: Order does not necessarily reflect citation order of authors. |
| Citation: | Minamide, Yasuhiko, Greg Morrisett, and Robert Harper. 1996. Typed closure conversion. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (St. Petersburg Beach, Florida, United States, January 21-24, 1996): POPL '96, 271-283. New York: ACM. |
| Full Text & Related Files: |
Morrisett_TypeClosureConversion.pdf (261.5Kb; PDF) 
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| Abstract: | Closure conversion is a program transformation used by compilers to separate code from data. Previous accounts of closure conversion use only untyped target languages. Recent studies show that translating to typed target languages is a useful methodology for building compilers, because a compiler can use the types to implement efficient data representations, calling conventions, and tag-free garbage collection. Furthermore, type-based translations facilitate security and debugging through automatic type checking, as well as correctness arguments through the method of logical relations. We present closure conversion as a type-directed, and type preserving translation for both the simply-typed and the polymorphic λ--calculus. Our translations are based on a simple "closures as objects" principle: higher-order functions are viewed as objects consisting of a single method (the code) and a single instance variable (the environment). In the simply-typed case, the Pierce-Turner model of object typing where objects are packages of existential type suffices. In the polymorphic case, more careful tracking of type sharing is required. We exploit a variant of the Harper-Lillibridge "translucent type" formalism to characterize the types of polymorphic closures. |
| Published Version: | http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/237721.237791 |
| Terms of Use: | This article is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#LAA |
| Citable link to this page: | http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:3710800 |
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