[PL-sem-jr] Talk today, Mon 6/7, 14:00

[Vincent St-Amour]

Mon 6/7 Room WVH166 14:00-16:00

Stephen - Continuation Marks

Many language features and tools like steppers and debuggers need
access to the runtime control stack of a program. However just giving
these tools full access to the control stack is undesirable for many
reasons like security and portability. Instead, John Clements, in his
dissertation, introduces continuation marks, which are a novel
abstraction for accessing the control stack. Continuation marks are
restricted enough that the downsides of granting stack access are
minimized, but are still sufficiently powerful that they can be used
to implement a wide variety of language features and tools. Also,
using continuation marks has many additional benefits such as making
it easier to give a formal specification for tools implemented with
continuation marks.