Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

The PROG feature in LISP can be viewed as a notation for a graph of expressions, corresponding to the standard flowchart. Although PROG and it associated special forms, GO and RETURN, are commonly implemented as LISP functions, we show that PROGs can be transformed into equivalent LAMBDA-expressions that contain no GO or RETURN statements at all, and therefore run faster than PROG by avoiding runtime overhead. The transformation program is included in the report.