CONS Should Not CONS Its Arguments, Part II: Cheney on the M.T.A. (1994) [1 citations — 0 self]
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author = {Henry G. Baker},
title = {CONS Should Not CONS Its Arguments, Part II: Cheney on the M.T.A.},
year = {1994}
}
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Abstract:
Previous Schemes for implementing full tail-recursion when compiling into C have required some form of "trampoline" to pop the stack. We propose solving the tail-recursion problem in the same manner as Standard ML of New Jersey, by allocating all frames in the (garbage-collected) heap. The Scheme program is translated into continuation-passing style, so the target C functions never return. The C stack pointer then becomes the allocation pointer for a Cheney-style copying garbage collection scheme. Our Scheme can use C function calls, C arguments, C variable-arity functions, and separate compilation without requiring complex block-compilation of entire programs. Introduction IEEE Scheme [IEEE90] requires that all functions be properly tail-recursive, in order that tail-recursive programs not require an unbounded amount of stack space. Several Scheme compilers have targeted the C language [Bartlett89], because C is an efficient systems programming language which is available on nearly ev...
