This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 18 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 18 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
> How many of you use call/cc and continuation objects > (rather than mimicing continuations with lambda's) > in large programs? Do "we" really use it to implement > coroutines and backtracking and threads and whatever? The last time I did backtracking, I built my success and failure continuations explicitly with lambda. I didn't use call/cc. I've been toying with the idea of implementing a debugger (the ordinary Unix kind, for debugging C and C++ programs) with Scheme as an extension language. Michael Golan invented a very elegant notation for traversing arrays, linked lists, trees, and so on, for use in a debugger; he named it "Duel". His notation is modeled after Icon's generators, which are a backtracking / coroutine kind of idea. At first I thought: wow, a natural real-life application for call/cc. But then I realized that I'd really rather implement Duel using explicit continuation procedures. In these situations, you always use continuations in some constrained, stylized way; writing them out actually makes that style more apparent. And multiple value return is more graceful when you've written out your continuation procedures. I think call/cc has a lot of disadvantages. - It's hard to understand call/cc itself. - It's hard to understand programs that use call/cc. I still have a hard time reasoning about programs that use it in any but the most constrained ways. For example, certain transformations that I expect to preserve meaning (perhaps because I have habits of thought learned from other languages) don't in the presence of call/cc. I still don't really understand why call/cc needs special consideration in static type inference. And so on. - It imposes a lot of weird global constraints on implementations, making them harder to maintain. (Maybe this is the same as the last point, if you blur the line between an implementation and the programs you run on it.) I often suspect that the Authors simply have a fascination with the symmetry between calls and returns. Thus all these papers about CPS. In that light, call/cc and multiple value returns make sense. But I don't think that's the best way to choose features for inclusion in a language meant to be used, not just reasoned about.