gmane.comp.lang.lightweight

Who 'invented' CPS?

Hi,

This is a question for historians. ;)

Who 'invented' or discovered continuation-passing style? Was this part  
of the lambda papers or did this come up earlier? Was the style used  
before it got that name?

Thanks a lot in advance for any hints...

Pascal

--

-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc <at> p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium

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Joe Marshall | 29 Nov 22:00

Re: Who 'invented' CPS?

I'm gonna guess that Hewitt did.

On Nov 29, 2007 12:20 PM, Pascal Costanza <pc <at> p-cos.net> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> This is a question for historians. ;)
>
> Who 'invented' or discovered continuation-passing style? Was this part
> of the lambda papers or did this come up earlier? Was the style used
> before it got that name?
>
> Thanks a lot in advance for any hints...
>
> Pascal
>
> --
> Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc <at> p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
> Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
> Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium
>
>
>
>
>
>

--

-- 
~jrm

(Continue reading)

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Pascal Costanza | 29 Nov 22:08

Re: Who 'invented' CPS?


On 29 Nov 2007, at 22:00, Joe Marshall wrote:

> I'm gonna guess that Hewitt did.

:-D

Neelakantan Krishnaswami sent me the link to a paper about "The  
Discoveries of Continuations" at http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/ 
261425.html which also covers CPS, and the first one was actually van  
Wijngaarden in 1964, but apparently it was also independently  
discovered by others later on...

Pascal

--

-- 
Pascal Costanza, mailto:pc <at> p-cos.net, http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Programming Technology Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium

headers

Paul A. Steckler | 29 Nov 22:07

Re: Who 'invented' CPS?

See http://www.brics.dk/~hosc/vol11/2-editorial.html.

This page describes an issue of Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation 
from the late 90s that reprinted some of the original papers 
on CPS and continuations.  The page claims that Michael Fischer
invented CPS.

-- Paul

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Anton van Straaten | 29 Nov 22:11

Re: Who 'invented' CPS?

Pascal Costanza wrote:
> This is a question for historians. ;)

Are people who play historians on the Internet allowed to respond?

> Who 'invented' or discovered continuation-passing style? 

A. van Wijngaarden, in 1964.

> Was this part 
> of the lambda papers or did this come up earlier? 

About a decade earlier.

> Was the style used before it got that name?

Yes.

> Thanks a lot in advance for any hints...

See the Reynolds paper "The Discoveries of Continuations":

    http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/261425.html

The paper is worth reading, but the summary re CPS is that at a 
conference, Van Wijngaarden presented the idea of a preprocessor that 
translated from Algol 60 into a restricted sublanguage, in which the 
final translation phase was essentially CPS.

However, the idea didn't take hold at that time, even though Dijkstra,

(Continue reading)

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Matthias Felleisen | 29 Nov 22:18

Re: Who 'invented' CPS?

The earliest citation for something close to cps -- described  
informally -- took place at a post-talk discussion, recorded for  
posterity by the secretary of the conference (imagine such  
backwardness of using a conference to get feedback on a paper!). It  
is from around 1961 or 1962 and discusses tail-jumping behavior.

Around 1967-1969, several different accounts popped up in a number of  
contexts: L. Morris, a Polish guy whose name escapes me, Hewitt's  
actor stuff suggests it, Reynolds. A couple of years later formal  
descriptions showed up: Fischer and Abdali and Plotkin. Eventually  
you saw it used in denotational semantics by Strachey and Wadsworth  
(full jumps).

John Reynolds once said to me "it was in the air, everyone knew about  
it." Or "the real question was back then, who hadn't come up with the  
trick yet."

-- Matthias

On Nov 29, 2007, at 3:20 PM, Pascal Costanza wrote:

> Hi,
>
> This is a question for historians. ;)
>
> Who 'invented' or discovered continuation-passing style? Was this  
> part of the lambda papers or did this come up earlier? Was the  
> style used before it got that name?
>

(Continue reading)