Re: So, what the heck is a continuation anyway?

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 03:52 PM 12/10/2001 -0500, Bruce Lewis wrote:
>Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> writes:
>
> > Could someone give me an explanation of them? (Preferably in words of 
> three
> > syllables or less, geared towards an inveterate assembly language
> > programmer? :)
>
>That's not exactly fair, given that you used words of more than three
>syllables in your question.

I was waiting to see if someone'd notice continuation was a 5-syllable word. :)

The engine will support tail calls, but that's not necessarily sufficient, 
since many of the languages we want running on it (perl for starters) 
really does need scratchpad allocation/deallocation at scope boundaries to 
handle lexical variables. (We can, and thinking about it will, do tail 
calls if we're jumping into a sub out of a scope with no lexicals)

Still, the tack I'm taking with the engine is to make as much as reasonable 
part of the core. Yeah it violates the "small, simple, and elegant" 
principle, but that's OK with me. :) The more functionality, and the more 
advanced functionality, that the core engine provides, the less low-level 
annoying stuff people need to do. That leaves more time to do interesting 
things.


					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk