Re: Continuations

["Serguei Mourachov" <address@hidden>]

>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?  All these things
>that people seem to have so much trouble with, like first-class procedures
>and continuations, are really easy to understand once you see how they can
>be implemented in a page or two of code.  No analogies about six-year-old's
>rooms needed.  No scary mathematics required.  All your questions answered
>in simple concrete operational terms.

You are right. Our company created a Java framework that is based on
continuations,
to do so I had to write Java bytecode interpreter in Java to be able to
reify execution context.
Only now, after having done this I think I started understand continuations
completely.

But now I have another question about continuations: how useful they are for
*masses* of developers?
Does typical programmer need to know about and use continuations?
What kind of advantages continuations bring into development process?
Even reading archive of this list I can see that there is some level of
confusion about continuations.
What can we expect from "simple" developer if we give him continuations as
part of "mainstream" language (such as Java, C#, etc)?

Serguei Mourachov

www.velare.com