An Early Use of Continuations and Partial Evaluation for Compiling Rules Written in First-Order Predicate Calculus

Abstract

This brief historical note describes research done in the period 1970-1973, and where continuations were introduced in a fairly pragmatic way together with partial evaluation in order to compile “rules” expressed as statements in first-order predicate calculus. Although the methods used at that time were quite straightforward, this work may shed some light on the early history of the concept of continuations. In particular, unlike other early contributions that addressed issues in mainstream programming languages, the present approach initially addressed implementation techniques for special-purpose languages.