School of Computing

Pretty printing with delimited continuations

Olaf Chitil

Technical report 4-06, University of Kent, Computing Laboratory, June 2006.

Abstract

Pretty printing is the task of nicely formatting tree structured data within a given line width limit. In 1980 Oppen published a pretty printing algorithm that takes time linear in the size of the input, independent of the line width, and uses only limited look-ahead. This work inspired the development of a number of purely functional pretty printing libraries in Haskell. Here I present a new functional pretty printing algorithm that has all the nice properties of Oppen's and is surprisingly simple. A double-ended queue of delimited continuations is the key to addressing all aspects of the problem explicitly.

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Bibtex Record

@techreport{2381,
author = {Olaf Chitil},
title = {Pretty Printing with Delimited Continuations},
month = {June},
year = {2006},
pages = {182-196},
keywords = {determinacy analysis, Craig interpolants},
note = {},
doi = {},
url = {http://www.cs.kent.ac.uk/pubs/2006/2381},
    publication_type = {techreport},
    submission_id = {18750_1151580575},
    type = {Technical report},
    number = {4-06},
    institution = {University of Kent, Computing Laboratory},
}

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