Re: CPS in Parrot (was: A plea for a new old language)

[Geoffrey Knauth <address@hidden>]

On Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, at 18:10 US/Eastern, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> your first impression is that the author's either mad or doing the CS 
> equivalent of particle physics.
> [...] a lot of people never get taught anything about continuations, 
> and all they know about them is that most folks think they're Deep 
> Black Magic.

On Tuesday, Aug 5, 2003, at 19:52 US/Eastern, Michael Vanier wrote:
> Continuations used in the call/cc sense violate our most basic
> assumption about functions, which is that a function called from HERE 
> is
> going to return back HERE (the same place).  Continuations let you 
> say: a
> function called from HERE is going to return back WHEREVER, where 
> WHEREVER
> is some location in the code that was previously captured in the
> continuation, lexicals and all.

We need good pictures that show how continuations work, and good 
stories.

Maybe we need a few Star Trek episodes on continuations.  Star Trek 
made people comfortable with wormholes, temporal distortions and 
parallel universes, now stock devices.  When they appear in episodes, 
viewers guess what's coming, while the stories remain interesting.

Geoffrey
--
Geoffrey S. Knauth | http://knauth.org/gsk