Stephen  knows  this  stuff better than I, but I know that we talked a lot to
Richard about his experiences with full CPS conversion and I  know  that  the
notion  of  using  CPS to express the intra-procedural flow was from him.  At
the time I was arguing for the advantages of CPS (over direct  style)  and  I
remember  showing  an example from Shiver's thesis where top-level procedures
were transformed into continuations (because they always were called with the
same  continuation).   I  think  that Stephen put contification into MLton in
response to that.  (Although it might have waited until he saw that this  was
going to be required for nested loops, as in matrix multiplication.)