Re: A plea for a new old language

["Serguei Mourachov" <address@hidden>]

Have you looked at stackless Python http://www.stackless.com ?

SM

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Sugalski" <dan@sidhe.org>
To: <ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, May 07, 2003 8:33 AM
Subject: A plea for a new old language


> I just spent part of last night and a bit of this morning putting 
> together a layman's explanation of continuation passing style. I 
> have, at this point, finally realized how useful it is in some 
> circumstances and the possibilities it gives for runtime 
> optimization. I like it, and I *really* want to switch Parrot over to 
> a CPS. (Or is that "CPS style"?) The languages I care about aren't 
> going to pay any more for the things that continuations require.
> 
> But I can't.
> 
> Continuations, bluntly, give people the screaming heebie-jeebies.
> 
> This is partly because continuations are just very different from 
> what people are used to. And partly because they're presented in 
> conjunction with Lisp and/or Scheme. It's a double whammy--if 
> continuations themselves don't get folks, Lisp/Scheme does--and 
> because of it folks run screaming from continuations. That's a damn 
> shame.
> 
> I want to use CPS in parrot. The performance impact they have doesn't 
> affect me, since I'm already paying it, and I could actually get a 
> win in some circumstances. Plus it simplifies the heck out of tail 
> call optimizations. If I go CPS, though, I'm essentially waving a 
> Lovecraftian horror at my developer base, and I just can't do that.
> 
> 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.
> -- 
>                                          Dan
> 
> --------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
> Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
> dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
>                                        teddy bears get drunk
>