Is Continuation-Passing Useful for Data Flow Analysis?

Abstract

The widespread use of the continuation-passing style (CPS) transformation in compilers, optimizers, abstract interpreters, and partial evaluators reflects a common belief that the transformation has a positive effect on the analysis of programs. Investigations by Nielson [13] and Burn/Filho [5,6] support, to some degree, this belief with theoretical results. However, they do not pinpoint the source of increased abstract information and do not explain the observation of many people that continuation-passing confuses some conventional data flow analyses.