On Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 11:07 PM, David-Sarah Hopwood
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
>> On Dec 5, 2008, at 10:00 AM, Jon Zeppieri wrote:
>>
>>> A label is an escape continuation. Once control has returned past the
>>> point where the continuation was captured, it's dead, and it can't be
>>> resumed.
>>
>> So return from a lambda is sometimes but not always a runtime error?
>
> That in itself does not seem much of a problem (it doesn't seem to be
> in Smalltalk or E).
>
>> Other times it can return through multiple levels of function calls
>> without raising an exception? That seems pretty bad for ease of
>> understanding and for performance of implementations.
>
> I agree, although I would express this as a safety issue: the safety
> hazard is that you may call a lambda without expecting it to perform
> a jump within the calling scope. The performance issue is that *all*
> calls that are within the scope of a labelled statement or loop must
> check for an escape.
I don't get it. What issue is raised by return-to-label that isn't
already raised by exceptions? They're practically the same thing,
only return-to-label is *easier* to analyze statically, because
'return' can only jump to a label that is lexically (not just
dynamically) in scope.
>
> There is a possibility for solving both of these issues while still
> allowing all of the suggested uses of lambdas. It involves permitting
> a given call to perform an escape (that is, break, continue or return)
> only if it is explicitly marked as being able to do so. If an unmarked
> call would escape, then it instead throws an exception.
>
> For example (syntax intended only as a strawman; I know it is
> incompatible to add an 'escape' keyword):
>
> CallExpression :
> ...
> 'escape' CallExpression Arguments
>
> Then a user-defined 'while' could be written as:
>
> const _while = \(cond, body) {
> // escapes from 'cond' are intentionally disallowed;
> // only 'body' can escape.
> if (cond()) { escape body(); escape while(cond, body); }
> };
>
Can the call to cond throw? If so, what did you gain from this?
-Jon
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