The contraction of control implementations

Abstract

The implementation of a high level language which provides higher control forms such as concurrency and coroutines along with the more traditional recursive procedures is obligated to support all control forms in a reasonably efficient manner. In particular, the implementation of a general purpose language (such as Simula or Ada) should contract gracefully into a scheme incurring overhead approximately the same amount as a simple stack when presented with programs which employ control forms no more general than recursive procedures. This study is a quantitative investigation into the contraction of implementations capable of supporting higher control forms into an environment in which recursive procedures are the most complex control form. A technique called the stack-heap is shown to contract most fully.