Invertible Syntax without the Tuples (Functional Pearl)

Abstract: In the seminal paper 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 such as lists and trees. Along the way, continuation passing got lost. This paper argues that Danvy's insight remains 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.