Continuation-passing Style - Use in Other Fields

Use in Other Fields

Outside of computer science, CPS is of more general interest as an alternative to the conventional method of composing simple expressions into complex expressions. For example, within linguistic semantics, Chris Barker and his collaborators have suggested that specifying the denotations of sentences using CPS might explain certain phenomena in natural language .

In mathematics, the Curry–Howard isomorphism between computer programs and mathematical proofs relates continuation-passing style translation to a variation of double-negation embeddings of classical logic into intuitionistic (constructive) logic. Unlike the regular double-negation translation, which maps atomic propositions p to ((p → ⊥) → ⊥), the continuation passing style replaces ⊥ by the type of the final expression. Accordingly, the result is obtained by passing the identity function as a continuation to the CPS-style expression, as in the above example.

Classical logic itself relates to manipulating the continuation of programs directly, as in Scheme's call-with-current-continuation control operator, an observation due to Tim Griffin (using the closely related C control operator)