On Oct 8, 11:07 pm, Bakul Shah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > Again I am depressed to encounter a fundamentally new concept that I > > was all along unheard of. > > The concept is 37 years old. Wadsworth in his "Continuation > Revisited" paper says he & Strachey were struggling with > extending the technique of denotational semantics to describe > jumps and not finding a satisfactory answer. Then, in his > words: > > in October 1970 Strachey showed me a paper "Proving > algorithms by tail functions" by Mazurkiewicz [2] which he > had obtained from an IFIP WG2.2 meeting. Just the phrase > "tail functions" in the title was enough -- given the > experience of our earlier struggles -- for the ideas to > click into place! The (meaning of the) "rest of the program" > was needed as an argument to the semantic functions -- just > so those constructs that did not use it, like jumps, could > throw it anyway. The term "continuation" was coined as > capturing the essence of this extra argument (though I > often wished to have a shorter word!) and the rest, as they > say, is history. > > > Its not even in paul graham's book where i > > learnt part of Lisp. Its in Marc Feeley's video. > > > > Can anyone explain: > > > > (1) its origin > > (2) its syntax and semantics in emacs lisp, common lisp, scheme > > (3) Is it present in python and java ? > > (4) Its implementation in assembly. for example in the manner that > > pointer fundamentally arises from indirect addressing and nothing new. > > So how do you juggle PC to do it. > > (5) how does it compare to and superior to a function or subroutine > > call. how does it differ. > > > > Thanks a lot. > > > > (6) any good readable references that explain it lucidly ? > > You might like this one: > > http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2005/04/13/Continuations-for-Curmudg...
thanks for the link but can you plz upload the paper so we can also get it. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list