Re: continuations in the real world?

[Zooko <address@hidden>]

 Tripp Scott <tripps81@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Aside from Viaweb/Yahoo! stores, are there any other
> commercial sites using this style of programming?

There is a big debate in the world of "peer-to-peer", "web services", et cetera
about programming style for distributed computation.  One position is "REST", 
which advocates using HTTP GET and PUT for all of your remote invocations.  One 
position is normal old RPC.  A third doesn't have a name yet AFAIK, but it is 
non-blocking RPC which results in something like continuation-passing style.

For the center of debate, see the decentralization mailing list (it is too noisy 
for me so I haven't actually read this debate I'm telling you about):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/decentralization/

I'm the leader of an open source project which uses the continuationish style 
(in Python):

http://mnet.sf.net/

A very good argument for this position is from Mark Miller:

http://erights.org/elib/concurrency/index.html

, author of the E language:

http://erights.org/

(Note: the design of E explicitly eschews unlimited continuations, but it 
embraces them in one-use-only form for RPC and other promise-resolution 
operations.  Apropos recent discussion on ll1, perhaps the continuations which 
are just powerful enough for RPC purposes are not the true continuations.)

Regards,

Zooko

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                 zooko.com
Security and Distributed Systems Engineering
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