Syntactic accidents in program analysis: on the impact of the CPS transformation

We show that a non-duplicating transformation into Continuation-Passing Style (CPS) has no effect on control-flow analysis, a positive effect on binding-time analysis for traditional partial evaluation, and no effect on binding-time analysis for continuation-based partial evaluation: a monovariant control-flow analysis yields equivalent results on a direct-style program and on its CPS counterpart, a monovariant binding-time analysis yields less precise results on a direct-style program than on its CPS counterpart, and an enhanced monovariant bindingtime analysis yields equivalent results on a direct-style program and on its CPS counterpart. Our proof technique amounts to constructing the CPS counterpart of flow information and of binding times. Our results formalize and confirm a folklore theorem about traditional binding-time analysis, namely that CPS has a positive effect on binding times. What may be more surprising is that the benefit does not arise from a standard refin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICFP
• Authors: Daniel Damian, Olivier Danvy
• Keywords: Analysis Yields, Binding-time Analysis, CPS Counterpart, ICFP 2000, Programming Languages