On 10/26/06, Bob Rogers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: Tom Metro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [...] > Guido made comparisons to Perl only in two areas - saying he likes > generators and iterators better than continuations . . . > > made me think of a paper [1] I only stumbled on recently (despite it > being 13 years old!) on the semantic weaknesses of iterators. I found > it while researching coroutines; I can think of no more compelling > demonstration of the power of continuations than the fact that they make > coroutines trivial to implement [2]. [...]
While I agree that continuations are insanely powerful, I likewise prefer generators and iterators to continuations. Why? Well suppose that you write some complex code using continuations. Suppose that something goes wrong. Now you want to debug it. So you'd want some useful debugging information. Something like, say, a stack backtrace. You're outta luck. To me the ability to tackle difficult constructs is less important than the ability to provide clear debugging information if things go wrong. And their power and flexibility causes continuations to lose on that metric. Cheers, Ben _______________________________________________ Boston-pm mailing list [email protected] http://mail.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/boston-pm
