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, 
Hoare, McCarthy, McIlroy and Strachey all participated in the 
discussion.  The paper suggests that Van Wijngaarden didn't motivate the 
idea in a general way.  However, Dijkstra took one important lesson from 
the talk: the idea that gotos were unnecessary, an idea which he later 
expanded on.  The rest, as they say, is... a continuation.

Anton