Age of Continuations?

[Francois-Rene Rideau <address@hidden>]

OK, so what is the oldest continuation that has been invoked?
Have you ever invoked a ten-year-old continuation?
What did you feel? Deja vu?
Or did you not realize that you invoked it,
because you had included your own state in the continuation?
So maybe you're running forever the same events in an infinite loop?

What makes continuations useful is that they capture
SOME of the state of the universe, but not ALL of it.
In other words, continuations are useful in as much as they allow
to draw a line between what's IN and what's OUT of the saved state.
Just like all concepts, what makes it meaningful is its ability
to distinguish things -- a continuation capturing all the universe
(including us) would be as useless as a continuation capturing nothing at all.
Now, in concurrent multi-agent systems, there are many different ways
to draw such a line, and a same application may benefit from drawing
different such lines depending on the operation being performed.

Now for the real question: are there any systems that have formalized
this ability to draw many different lines around the state to be saved
by call/cc ?

(call/cc good)

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
(define (cthulhu_fhthagn)          ;   Iver Odin Kvello, iverk@hfstud.uio.no
   (call/cthulhu  (lambda (destroy) ;   Lambda, the Ultimate Horror
      (if (stars-are-right? (now)) (destroy 'everything) (cthulhu_fhtagn)))))