Relating Staged Computation to the Record Calculus

Abstract

It has been previously shown that there is a close relation between record calculus and program generation (e.g. Lisp-like quasiquotations): A translation has been defined to convert staged expressions to record calculus expressions, and it has been shown that the call-by-value semantics of the staged and the record calculi are equivalent modulo the translation and admin reductions. In this work, we investigate the relation further. The contributions are twofold: (1) We fine-tune the previously shown relation between the two operational semantics, and obtain more precise results. In particular, we show that only two kinds of admin reductions suffice, and these reductions can be applied exhaustively. (2) We define a reverse translation that converts record calculus expressions back to the staged calculus, allowing us to go back and forth between the two calculi. We believe that these results provide an important step towards reusing already-existing record calculus static analyses to reason about staged expressions.