Articles

Abstract

The understanding of continuation-passing style (CPS) translations, an historical source of denotational semantics for programming languages, benefits from notions brought by linear logic, such as focalisation, polarities and the involutive negation. Here we aim to show how linear logic helps as well when continuations are delimited, i.e. return and can be composed, in the sense of Danvy and Filinski.

First we provide a polarised calculus with delimited control (first-class delimited continuations) which is, at the level of computation, a variant of Girard's polarised classical logic LC. It contains variants of delimited control calculi which spawned as answers to the question “what order of evaluation can we consider with delimited control?”. Thus our polarised calculus is one answer which is unifying to some degree.

Subsequently we decompose the calculus through polarised linear logic. The only difference with non-delimited continuations is the use of specific exponentials, that account for the specific semantics of the target of delimited CPS translation, as well as annotations of type-and-effect systems.

As a by-product, we obtain an explanation of CPS translations through a factoring, each step of which accounts for distinct phenomena of CPS translations. Although the factoring also holds for non-delimited CPS translations, it did not appear in its entirety before.

Keywords

Delimited control, continuation-passing style, abstract machines, type-and-effect systems, polarization, classical logic, linear logic, sequent calculus.

Abstract

We review the close relationship between abstract machines for (call-by-name or call-by-value) lambda-calculi (extended with Felleisen's C) and sequent calculus, reintroducing on the way Curien-Herbelin's syntactic kit expressing the duality of computation. We use this kit to provide a term language for a presentation of LK (with conjunction, disjunction, and negation), and to transcribe cut elimination as (non confluent) rewriting. A key slogan here, which may appear here in print for the first time, is that commutative cut elimination rules are explicit substitution propagation rules.

We then describe the focalised proof search discipline (in the classical setting), and narrow down the language and the rewriting rules to a confluent calculus (a variant of the second author's focalising system L). We then define a game of patterns and counterpatterns, leading us to a fully focalised finitary syntax for a synthetic presentation of classical logic, that provides a quotient on (focalised) proofs, abstracting out the order of decomposition of negative connectives.

Keywords

Sequent calculus, classical logic, polarization, focalization, explicit substitutions, pattern matching.

Abstract

We develop a polarised variant of Curien and Herbelin's lambda-bar-mu-mu-tilde calculus suitable for sequent calculi that admit a focalising cut elimination (i.e. whose proofs are focalised when cut-free), such as Girard's classical logic LC or linear logic. This gives a setting in which Krivine's classical realisability extends naturally (in particular to call-by-value), with a presentation in terms of orthogonality. We give examples of applications to the theory of programming languages.

In this version extended with appendices, we in particular give the two-sided formulation of LC with the involutive classical negation. We also show that there is in classical realisability a notion of internal completeness similar to the one of Ludics.

Keywords

Realizablity, polarisation, focalization, sequent calculus, classical logic, orthogonality, Ludics.