Abstract

. We define a partial continuation as the difference of two continuations. We exhibit, in a single framework, several design choices and their impact on semantics. The ability of partial continuations to manipulate stack frames blurs the nature of dynamic extent; therefore, we introduce a new concept of prefixal extent that characterises the time during which a partial continuation can be reified. We propose two equivalent formal semantics for partial continuations: a context-rewriting system and a cps translation. Two new and realistic examples illustrate both the interest of partial continuations and the expressiveness of our choices. 1 Introduction The mathematical concept of continuation was introduced by Strachey and Wadsworth [18] [16] to give a semantics to control operators such as goto. The continuation of an expression represents the rest of the computation to be performed after evaluation of this expression. Some programming languages, such as Scheme and SML of New-Jersey, ...

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