ICFP/SPLASH 2025
Sun 12 - Sat 18 October 2025 Singapore
Tue 14 Oct 2025 11:40 - 12:05 at Peony West - Continuations at Work Chair(s): Sam Lindley

In the seminal paper \emph{Functional unparsing}, Olivier Danvy used continuation passing to reanalyse printf-like format strings as combinators. In the intervening decades, the conversation shifted towards a concurrent line of work — applicative, monadic or arrow-based combinator libraries — in an effort to find combinators for invertible syntax descriptions that simultaneously determine a parser as well as a printer, and with more expressive power, able to handle inductive structures like lists and trees. Along the way, continuation passing got lost. This paper argues that Danvy’s insight is just as relevant to the general setting as it was to the restricted setting of his original paper. Like him, we present three solutions that exploit continuation-passing style as an alternative to both dependent types and monoidal aggregation via nested pairs, in our case to parse and print structured data with increasing expressive power.

Tue 14 Oct

Displayed time zone: Perth change

10:50 - 12:05
Continuations at WorkOlivierFest at Peony West
Chair(s): Sam Lindley The University of Edinburgh
10:50
5m
Day opening
Opening
OlivierFest
Julia Lawall Inria, Fritz Henglein Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen (DIKU) and Deon Digital, Jens Palsberg University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Ilya Sergey National University of Singapore
10:55
20m
Talk
Continuations in Musicfestschrift
OlivierFest
Youyou Cong Institute of Science Tokyo
11:15
25m
Talk
Exotic Uses of Continuations
OlivierFest
Michael D. Adams National University of Singapore
11:40
25m
Talk
Invertible Syntax without the Tuples (Functional Pearl)festschrift
OlivierFest