The last few years have seen a renewed interest in continuations for expressing advanced control structures in programming languages, and new models such as Abstract Continuations have been proposed to capture these dimensions. This article investigates an alternative formulation, exploiting the latent expressive power of the standard continuation-passing style (CPS) instead of introducing yet other new concepts. We build on a single foundation: abstracting control as a hierarchy of continuations, each one modeling a specific language feature as acting on nested evaluation contexts. We show how iterating the continuation-passing conversion allows us to specify a wide range of control behavior. For example, two conversions yield an abstraction of Prologstyle backtracking. A number of other constructs can likewise be expressed i...

This paper points out and illustrates continuations as functions abstracting a delimited context instead of an unlimited one. When made available in an expression language, they provide a functional abstraction of control that can be used as any ordinary function. This approach sheds some light on the applicative aspects of continuations by getting rid of their imperative part: escaping. Continuations are made available as true, composable, and statically typable functions. They abstract a delimited context and their use is restricted to where necessary, in contrast to continuation-passing style. This setting has been developed under applicative order. Work is going on transposing it to another reduction order. This paper is organized as follows. The imperative aspects of continuations first are stressed. We develop on currying the definition of list catenation. Expressing it with an accumulator leads to continuation-passing style. The definition is turned back to direct style with acc...