On the Relation of Interaction Semantics to Continuations and Defunctionalization

Abstract

In game semantics and related approaches to programming language semantics,programs are modelled by interaction dialogues. Such models have recently beenused in the design of new compilation methods, e.g. for hardware synthesis orfor programming with sublinear space. This paper relates such semanticallymotivated non-standard compilation methods to more standard techniques in thecompilation of functional programming languages, namely continuation passingand defunctionalization. We first show for the linear {\lambda}-calculus thatinterpretation in a model of computation by interaction can be described as acall-by-name CPS-translation followed by a defunctionalization procedure thattakes into account control-flow information. We then establish a relationbetween these two compilation methods for the simply-typed {\lambda}-calculusand end by considering recursion