My Quote on the Continuation Passing Style

Albert Y. C. Lai, July 8 2004
trebla [at] vex [dot] net

Asking a functional programmer to always write continuations by hand is the same as asking an object-oriented programmer to always set up and use virtual method tables manually.

Remark: The continuation passing style is a fine internal representation for the computer. It may also be suitable for human use in some, but not all, applications; although all such applications I have seen are better expressed in monads. (Transforming non-tail to tail calls is not one such application; it should be automatic.)


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