On Fri, Jan 02, 2009 at 06:06:31PM -0800, Geoffrey Broadwell wrote:
: Meaning, the gather/take syntax doesn't make much sense, because we're
: not "gathering" anything; the PID file handler has nothing to return.
: We'd only be using it for the "side effect" of being able to pause the
: callee's execution and resume it later.
Leaving aside for the moment the question of how much we want mere
mortals to know about continuations when normal closures would do,
I think you're falling into a kind of P5Think here, that all forms
of nothing are equivalent. A take always returns a Capture object,
so at minimum you're gathering a list of Captures, even if they're
empty. If you like, you could also think of gathering continuations
or closures, depending on whether the object you take closes over
return context or just the rest of the current call.
In any case, I dislike the overloading of the function interface that
happens with many standard coroutine designs. That's why gather/take
is orthogonal to the function call interface.
As for syntactic relief, that will always be a macro away in Perl 6,
if you really want it. But I think "return {...}" and "take {...}"
are nice, explicit idioms for returning a closure, and we've gone to
some pains in Perl 6 to make a bare block behave that way without a
keyword, so I'm not in a hurry to huffmanize away a mere two characters
for what what many readers would view as a form of obfuscation.
As for true reusable continuations, I'm not opposed to having them
available in the language per se, but they're hard to implement on some
architectures, and I'll certainly frown on any attempt to confuse them
with either normal closures or even single-use continuations in the
minds of mere mortals. Using bare continuations where gather/take or
closures will do is like throwing out your steak knives because they
duplicate the functionality of your chain saw. :)
Larry
