[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, October 6, 2002
206 Egan  Hall, Northeastern University
    (building 44 on http://www.campusmap.neu.edu/)
1030-1230

John Clements

Peaceful Coexistence for Tail Calls & Stack Inspection

Security folklore holds that a programming language with stack
inspection for security permissions cannot implement a global tail
call optimization policy. That is, an implementation of such a
language may have to allocate memory for a tail call in the source
code. As a result, a program that uses only tail calls may
nevertheless exhaust the available memory.  We prove
this widely held belief wrong.  We exhibit an abstract machine for a
language with security stack inspection whose space consumption
function is equivalent to that of the canonical tail call optimizing
abstract machine.  The machine is surprisingly simple and suggests
that tail-calls are as easy to implement in a security setting as they
are in a conventional one.

Upcoming presentations:

10/16: Andrei Sabelfeld, Cornell University, Language-Based
Information-Flow Security 

--Mitch