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 12 natural way to express the results of those decisions. Continuation-passing style, while apparently applicative in nature, admits a peculiarly imperative interpretation as a consequence of the facts that it requires no control stack to be evaluated and that no functions ever return values. As a result, it is easily' converted to an imperative machine language. A SCHEME compiler should ideally be a designer of good data structures, since it may choose any representation whatsoever for environments. RABBIT has a rudimentary design knowledge, involving primarily the preferral of registers to heap-allocated storage. However, there is room for knowledge of "bit-diddling" representations. We suggest that those who have tried to design useful UNCOL's (UNiversal Computer-Oriented Languages) [Sammet] [Coleman] have perhaps been thinking too imperatively, and worrying more about data manipulation primitives than about environment and control issues. As a result, proposed UNCOLs have been little more than generalizations of contemporary machine languages. We suggest that SCHEME makes an ideal UNCOL at two levels. The first level is the fully applicative level, to which most source-language constructs are easily reduced; the second is the continuation-passing style level, which is easily reduced to machine language. We envision building a compiler in three stages: (a) reduction of a user language to basic SCHEME, whether by macros, a parser of algebraic syntax, or some other means; (b) optimization by means of SCHEME-level source-to-source transformations, and conversion to continuation-passing style; and (c) generation of code for' a particular machine. RABBIT addresses itself to the second stage. Data manipulation primitives are completely ignored at this stage, and are just passed along from input to output. These primitives, whether integer arithmetic, string