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No. I think you're missing the point. Continuations become a highly constrained kind of callback in continuation-passing style. Callbacks by themselves don't
by mattmight 16y ago
No. I think you're missing the point.
Continuations become a highly constrained kind of callback in continuation-passing style.
Callbacks by themselves don't make for a nice intermediate format for compilation, or a way to model exceptions or distributed computation.
They only gain these abilities when constrained as continuations in CPS.
- silentbicycle 16y agoFor good descriptions of using CPS as an intermediate representation in a compiler, check out Appel's _Compiling with Continuations_, Guy L. Steele's "Rabbit" thesis, Krantz's "Orbit" thesis, and chapter 12 of the first edition of _Essentials of Programming Languages_ (they cut it from later editions, unfortunately). Appel uses ML, the rest use Scheme.