Friday, October 07, 2005

A Technique for implementing first class continuations. From a comp.lang.scheme posting by Joe Marshall. This paper describes a technique for implementing first-class continuations in languages that do not support stack inspection and manipulation. The technique involves modifying procedures (or methods) such that they are able to co-operatively participate in the creation and use of first-class continuations. The transform differs from continuation-passing-style in that the call/return stack continues to be the primary mechanism for representing continuations; a heap representation of the continuation is only constructed when necessary. This may result in better performance than CPS-conversion for those programs that make only occasional use of first-class continuations. 3:45:28 PM

Peter Seibel has made available the system he used to produce the book Practical Common Lisp.  Naturally it's in Common Lisp. With an original document in a combination of TeX and wiki style markup you get nicely formatted PDF and HTML output. 3:10:24 PM