Re: What is a lightweight language

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

There is a lot about continuation hacking in On Lisp,
including examples of how to use them to implement
nondeterministic parsers, and how to fake them in CL.
Unfortunately On Lisp is out of print but I just got 
the rights back from Prentice Hall.  If anyone is
interested I could put those chapters online.  --pg

--- Jeremy Hylton <jeremy@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
> >>>>> "SK" == Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu> writes:
> 
>   SK> I think Joe Marshall's objection is strange, and hopefully
>   SK> isolated.  Maybe at MIT, they specialize in scaring their
>   SK> students by throwing big words like "continuation" (more than
>   SK> two syllables) at them.  Most of the rest of us get by without
>   SK> resorting to this.  As a result, our students learn Scheme the
>   SK> *exact same way* they learn any other language: a little bit at
>   SK> a time.
> 
> Dan Weinreb already mentioned that continuations aren't mentioned in
> SICP.  When I took 6.001, they didn't sneak them into the course
> notes
> either.  I didn't learn about continuations until I hit Gifford's
> graudate course on programming languages.  That seems just about
> right
> to me:  No need to get into continuations when you're learning what
> programming is, but no way to avoid them when you're learning about
> what programming languages are.
> 
> it-took-me-a-while-to-learn-that-Scheme-had-vectors-too-ly y'rs,
> Jeremy
> 


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