> > Joshua N Pritikin writes:
> > : http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/python/2000/10/04/stackless-intro.html
> >
> > Perl 5 is already stackless in that sense, though we never implemented
> > continuations. The main impetus for going stackless was to make it
> > possible to implement a Forth-style treaded code interpreter, though
> > we never put one of those into production either.
There's a large school of thought in the Lisp world that holds that
full continuations are a bad idea. See for example:
http://www.deja.com/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN=635369657
Executive summary of this article:
* Continuations are hard to implement and harder to implement
efficiently. Languages with continuations tend to be slower
because of the extreme generality constraints imposed by the
presence of continuations.
* Typical uses of continuations are for things like exception
handling. Nobody really uses continuations because they are too
difficult to understand. Exception handling is adequately served by
simpler and more efficient catch-throw mechanisms which everyone
already understands.
Anyone seriously interested in putting continuations into Perl 6 would
probably do well to read the entire thread headed by the article I
cited above.
