Re: Continuations

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 4:12 PM -0400 8/8/03, Alan Bawden wrote:
>The best way to understand what continuations are all about is to look at
>an interpreter that uses them. 
>
>When I read the first Scheme paper I had no idea what Sussman and Steele
>were talking about with their `catch' expression.  But in an appendix to
>their paper they included a Scheme interpreter (written in MacLisp -- a
>language I already knew), and by the end of the day I understood
>completely.

Congrats. You're rather atypical.

>Anyone who wants to explain continuations to the massses should sit down
>and write an interpreter (in some language that the masses are familiar
>with) for a simple language with a `catch' expression.
>
>Don't Perl or Java programmers ever write interpreters?

Rarely. These days almost *nobody* writes interpreters. But, then 
almost nobody ever has. In the past there were just fewer people 
overall, so almost nobody was a larger percentage of the population. 
I suspect you're also hanging around a rather unusual subset of 
programmers, which is a common thing for the people on this list.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
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