Abstract

Explicit parallelism can be introduced in Scheme by adding the constructs fork, pcall and future. Katz and Weise gave an implementation where those constructs are transparent even when rst class continuations are used. In this paper, we formalise this work by giving an operational semantics for a functional language with rst class continuations and transparent constructs for parallelism. We introduce a concept of higher order continuation that we call metacontinuation which preserves sequential properties of continuations in a parallel language. Keywords: Scheme, parallelism, transparency, continuation, metacontinuation, left expression, operational semantics. 1 Introduction There are essentially two trends to add parallel constructs to a functional language. On the one hand, the approach adopted by the ML community [17] consists in adding to the language the notions of processes, channels and communications as in calculi like CCS [16]. An operational semantics is given in [...

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