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A Modal Analysis of Staged Computation
journal contribution
posted on 1976-01-01, 00:00 authored by Rowan Davies, Frank PfenningWe show that a type system based on the intuitionistic modal logic S4 provides an expressive framework for specifying and analyzing computation stages in the context of typed λ-calculi and functional languages. We directly demonstrate the sense in which our λe→□-calculus captures staging, and also give a conservative embeddng of Nielson and Nielson's two-level functional language in our functional language Mini-ML □ , thus proving that binding-time correctness is equivalent to modal correctness on this fragment. In addition, Mini-ML□; can also express immediate evaluation and sharing of code across multiple stages, thus supporting run-time code generation as well as partial evaluation.