Cheney on the MTA (1994)
The article discusses a proposed method for implementing tail recursion in Scheme when compiling to C. It suggests using continuation-passing style to avoid stack overflow issues associated with traditional methods. The approach aims to simplify function calls and memory management by treating the C stack as a heap for dynamic allocation.
- ▪The proposed method converts Scheme into continuation-passing style before compiling to C functions.
- ▪This approach allows for normal C function calls while managing closures and user data structures efficiently.
- ▪The method aims to prevent stack overflow by using a garbage collection scheme that operates on the C stack.
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Record
| Original publisher | Plover |
| Canonical URL | https://www.plover.com/misc/hbaker-archive/CheneyMTA.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 25 May 2026 07:17:52 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-25T07:37:36.533Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-25T07:37:36.533Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | cxX6YRGjSP4E |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
CONS Should Not CONS Its Arguments, Part II: Cheney on the M.T.A.[1] DRAFT for comp.lang.scheme.c Feb. 4, 1994 ACM Sigplan Notices 30, 9 (Sept. 1995), 17-20. Henry G. Baker Nimble Computer Corporation, 16231 Meadow Ridge Way, Encino, CA 91436 (818) 501-4956 (818) 986-1360 (FAX) Copyright (c) 1994 by Nimble Computer Corporation. All rights reserved. Abstract Previous Schemes for implementing full tail-recursion when compiling into C have required some form of "trampoline" to pop the stack. We propose solving the tail-recursion problem in the same manner as Standard ML of New Jersey, by allocating all frames in the (garbage-collected) heap. The Scheme program is translated into continuation-passing style, so the target C functions never return.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Plover.
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