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Down with Emacs Lisp: dynamic scope analysis

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International Conference on Functional Programming archive
Proceedings of the sixth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming table of contents

Florence, Italy

Session: Session 1 table of contents

Pages: 38 - 49

Year of Publication: 2001

ISBN:1-58113-415-0

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Authors

Matthias Neubauer	Univ. Freiburg
Michael Sperber	Univ. Tübingen

Sponsor

SIGPLAN: ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

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Downloads (6 Weeks): 0, Downloads (12 Months): 20, Citation Count: 1

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ABSTRACT

It is possible to translate code written in Emacs Lisp or another Lisp dialect which uses dynamic scoping to a more modern programming language with lexical scoping while largely preserving structure and readability of the code. The biggest obstacle to such an idiomatic translation from Emacs Lisp is the translation of dynamic binding into suitable instances of lexical binding: Many binding constructs in real programs in fact exhibit identical behavior under both dynamic and lexical binding. An idiomatic translation needs to detect as many of these binding constructs as possible and convert them into lexical binding constructs in the target language to achieve readability and efficiency of the target code. The basic prerequisite for such an idiomatic translation is thus a dynamic scope analysis which associates variable occurrences with binding constructs. We present such an analysis. It is an application of the Nielson/Nielson framework for flow analysis to a semantics for dynamic binding akin to Moreau's. Its implementation handles a substantial portion of Emacs Lisp, has been applied to realistic Emacs Lisp code, and is highly accurate and reasonably efficient in practice.

REFERENCES

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references.

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