[Haskell-cafe] Examples of Continuation monad that impossible to understand and maintain?

[Jeff Clites]

Based on the preceding paragraph, I think that by “abuse” it means overuse, as in using CPS when you could have used straightforward code. I can imagine someone doing at the source code level the sort of things that would be done by a CPS-based compiler (converting everything possible to CPS), and ending up with a mess.

For example, imagine you started with this code snippet:

  let x = f a
        y = g x
  in h x y

If you fully convert that to CPS you’d end up with 3 continuations (I think) and it would be much harder to understand. And adding an additional let binding later might involve a bunch of restructuring.

I assume it just means that sort of thing. When someone first learns about continuations and their generality, it can be tempting to go overboard.

Jeff

> On Aug 31, 2021, at 3:03 AM, YueCompl via Haskell-Cafe <haskell-cafe at haskell.org> wrote:
> 
> Dear Cafe,
> 
> I'm wrapping up my CPS codebase to provide some monadic interface, it appears almost the Cont monad, so the following statement is a pretty valid caveat to me now:
> 
> > Abuse of the Continuation monad can produce code that is impossible to understand and maintain.
> 
> Which can be viewed in context of Hackage at: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/mtl/docs/Control-Monad-Cont.html#:~:text=Abuse%20of%20the%20Continuation%20monad%20can%20produce%20code%20that%20is%20impossible%20to%20understand%20and%20maintain 
> 
> But I can't find concrete examples demonstrating the "impossible to understand and maintain" situation, in figuring out what pitfalls I'd rather to avoid.
> 
> Please share what you know about it, many appreciations!
> 
> Background of my CPS necessarity: 
> 
> Library code need to delegate STM transaction boundary delimitation to (scripting) application code, though `inlineSTM :: STM a -> m a` can be used to force some action to be within current tx, the usual `>>=` binding should honor whether a separate `atomically` tx should be issued for its rhs computation, as specified by the scripting context.
> 
> Thanks,
> Compl
> 
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