Boston Sigplan Seminar on Continuation Semantics

["Peter Mager" <met9i7n%BOSTONU.BITNET@MITVMA.MIT.EDU>]

The following seminar may be of interest to members of the Scheme
community in the Boston area:

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Subject: SICPLAN Mtg, 19 May 88. G F Johnson: Partial Continuations and Stores
 in a Programming Environment
From: SICPLAN <Mooers@SH.CS.NET>
To: Sicplan-list@SH.CS.NET
Cc: mooers@SH.CS.NET, met9i7n%BOSTONU.BITNET@SH.CS.NET
Date: Fri, 06 May 88 15:58:18 -0400
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                 ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN

                      Thursday, May  19, 1988
                                8 P.M.

                        Intermetrics Atrium
                    725 Concord Ave., Cambridge

   Partial Continuations and Stores in a Programming Environment

                         Gregory F. Johnson
                     Computer Science Department
                       University of Maryland
                    ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN

 It is becoming widely recognized that the quality of a programming
 environment has a significant impact on the productivity of
 programmers.  The discipline of creating a formal language semantics
 has had a major positive influence on the design of programming
 languages, and we hypothesize that a similar formal approach will
 result in better programming environments.  To test this hypothesis,
 we have initiated the GL research project, in which a new (small)
 programming language, an environment, and a denotational semantics
 are being designed together. In particular, both partial
 continuations (functions representing part of the future execution of
 a partially completed program execution) and stores (finite functions
 representing the content of a computer's memory) can be obtained from
 the programming environment during execution of a program.  These
 objects can then be invoked and manipulated in a variety of ways,
 allowing the user a great deal of flexibility and room for
 interactive experimentation in arriving at understanding of the
 behavior of programs.  These facilities give rise to a new style of
 interaction with a programming environment that appears to be
 promising.


                ACM GREATER BOSTON CHAPTER SICPLAN

 Dear Colleague,

 Our speaker for May has been actively investigating continuation
 passing semantics and the use of continuations in programming
 environments for a number of years.  He is currently on the faculty
 of the University of Maryland.  Some of the material in this talk was
 presented in papers at the Sigplan'87 Interpreters Conference and at
 POPL'88.

 Our February talk by Robert Schwartz and John Yates showed us a new
 and promising approach to compiler code generation based on extending
 table driven pattern selection through the use of vector-valued
 predicates and dynamic programming techniques.  The resulting partial
 ordering of possible instruction sequences allows the code generation
 algorithm to achieve quasi-optimal (i.e. optimal with respect to the
 defined patterns and evaluation criteria) code sequences in linear
 time.  The presentation led to some interesting discusions among the
 100 or so people who attended.

 We will be meeting for dinner as usual at Joyce Chen's restaurant,
 390 Rindge Ave., Cambridge at 6:00 p.m.  before the meeting.  If you
 wish to come, please call Karen Kelly or "Sigplan dinner" at
 Intermetrics (661-1840) as early as possible so we can make the
 appropriate dinner reservation.

  Peter Mager
  chairperson, Boston SICPLAN