[Fwd: Re: Scheme style and Python style [was: Re: Typed Python?]]

Paul Prescod <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.lang.prothon.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
FYI...the eternal debate (in every language community) about the role of 
continuations...

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Scheme style and Python style [was: Re: Typed Python?]
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 15:05:11 -0400
From: François Pinard <[email protected]>
To: Michele Simionato <[email protected]>
CC: [email protected]
References: <[email protected]> 
<[email protected]> 
<[email protected]> 
<[email protected]> 
<[email protected]> 
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<[email protected]>

[Michele Simionato]

> Yes, indeed having iterators and generators built-in in the language
> (as well as an exception system) exhaust most of the use case for
> continuation so you don't really feel the need for them in Python in
> normal circumstances.

I recently worked on my little `pynits' tool (hoping to release it a
third time, as soon as I'm satisfied enough with the changes), and have
a need for continuations there.  The circumstances for that need may be
slightly unusual, but I would surely not qualify them as abnormal :-).

Suddenly backtracking out of a complex involvement for restarting in a
new direction, for the above project at least, requires a lot of state
resumption, and doing this cleanly in Python implies a rather strict and
burdening discipline about where and how the state information is kept.
While tractable, this is not as comfortable as I would have liked it...

Maybe I'll find better ways if I let the problem mature enough? :-)

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard
-- 
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