Abstract

We introduce graph reduction technology that implements functional languages with control, such as Scheme with call/cc, where continuations can be manipulated explicitly as values, and can be optimally reduced in the sense of Lévy. The technology is founded on proofnets for multiplicative-exponential linear logic, extending the techniques originally proposed by Lamping, where we adapt the continuation-passing style transformation to yield a new understanding of sharable values. Confluence is maintained by returning multiple answers to a (shared) continuation. Proofnets provide a concurrent version of linear logic proofs, eliminating structurally irrelevant sequentialization, and ignoring asymmetric distinctions between inputs and outputs -- dually, expressions and continuations. While Lamping's graphs and their variants encode an embedding of intuitionistic logic into linear logic, our construction implicitly contains an embedding of classical logic into linear logic. We propose...

Citations