RE: A plea for a new old language

["Brent Fulgham" <address@hidden>]

> So, the plea. Someone, anyone, *please* thump a procedural and/or OO 
> language to add in continuations. *Please*. If I had a base of folks 
> mildly familiar with continuations that didn't have a pavlovian 
> reaction to them things would be a lot better for me, and while 
> that's not going to happen maybe it will for the next slob that gets 
> stuck writing a language core. I'm trying to get Larry to do it with 
> Perl 6, but that's a ways off. Ruby does them but it's a little-used 
> feature. Beyond that... well, AFAIK, beyond that there's nothing. And 
> I'd really like there to be.

I can't think of any OO or Procedural languages, but here are a few
more things to look at:

1)  If I remember correctly, the logic-based language Mercury (http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury) was eventually modified to
produce high-level C code in a continuation-passing style (see this paper: http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/information/papers/hlc_cc.ps.gz
for details.)

2)  The New Jersey dialect of SML uses CPS in its implementation.

3)  Lots of interesting papers are available at Jim Bender's excellent
site (see http://library.readscheme.org/page6.html)

I'll try to think of others.

Personally, I think you should just *do* it!  Imagine what a "feather in the
cap" you would be creating for advanced languages by introducing such
a feature into Parrot....  Plus you would instantly make Parrot so much cooler
than any other alternatives.  :-)

-Brent