Combinators for impure yet hygienic code generation
Yukiyoshi Kameyama, Oleg Kiselyov, Chung-chieh Shan · 2014
Code generation is the leading approach to making high-performance software reusable. Effects are indispensable in code generators, whether to report failures or to insert let-statements and if-guards. Extensive painful experience shows that unrestricted effects interact with generated binders in undesirable ways to produce unexpectedly unbound variables, or worse, unexpectedly bound ones. These subtleties hinder domain experts in using and extending the generator. A pressing problem is thus to express the desired effects while regulating them so that the generated code is correct, or at least correctly scoped, by construction.