15-312 Foundations of Programming Languages
Lecture 14: Mutable Storage

After discussing several advanced type constructs (universal, existential, recursive), we return to extending the underlying computational mechanisms. Besides pure functional computation, we have considered exceptions and continuations, which are so-called control effects. In this lecture we discuss a so-called store effects, where the abstract machine maintains a global store that can be updated destructively. This allows efficient implementation of some algorithms that may otherwise be difficult to express purely functionally. On the other hand, it is often overused when it is not strictly necessary.

Mutable storage changes the nature of the language significantly and it makes it more difficult to reason about, because an expression does not just return value, but could change computational state. In the following lecture we discuss an alternative approach that provides for a cleaner separation of effects from pure (that is, effect-free) computation. As we will see, this also has some costs.


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Frank Pfenning