Re: What is a lightweight language

[Dorai Sitaram <address@hidden>]

Joe Marshall writes
> 
> I may be inviting the wrath of other schemers, but I don't consider
> call-with-current-continuation to be essential to scheme.

I am enraged at this, but in a low-key Dukakis 
way. :-)  Perhaps like you, I find Scheme without
call/cc to be more than adequate for a large percentage
of my coding tasks.  Scheme without call/cc is my
"script"ural language of choice (after I'd enhanced it
with Perl5 regexps).  But I'd still want the option of
using call/cc for tasks that needed it.  

The one thing I don't like about call/cc is the
sneaking suspicion that there may be a
pay-even-if-you-don't-use-it cost associated with
it.  I don't know how much this cost is a factor in the
Scheme impls of today [1], and I suspect the answer to
this question should be of some interest to the other
language communities here that are considering
including call/cc but want to do the fast thing.

--d

[1] Command-line options like --no-callcc or
--only-escaping-continuations may address this
issue somewhat, but their value seems to be as
assertions rather than as efficiency-boosters.