Continuations on the Web
May 25, 2006
An excellent discussion of pros and cons of using continuations for Web apps; as much as I’m a fan of Scheme, I still can’t claim to have found a good use for this particular feature.
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This page contains a single entry from Stefan Tilkov's Random Stuff posted on May 25, 2006 9:29 AM. The previous post in this blog was Jacek, Lessig Style: Premature Standardization. The next post in this blog is Are Web Services Becoming Web Services Again?. Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.
Comments
Continuations are most useful as a building block for other useful things. Backtracking — e.g. in logic programming, Processes — e.g. in concurrent programming, Co-routines — e.g. in web interactions, Exception handling, etc. All of these can be implemented in “one-off” specialized ways. But if you have continuations then the implementations of each of these becomes nearly trivial.
If you like these, then you like continuations.
Posted by: Patrick Logan at May 25, 2006 8:00 PM | link
I guess my applications are usually too boring — while e.g. RoR’s use of Ruby’s DSL features is something that has a direct application to problems I deal with, I’m rarely involved with logic programming. Obviously exception handling or co-routines are something else, though - I’ll have to do some research to appreciate this (any pointers appreciated).
Posted by: Stefan Tilkov at May 25, 2006 8:08 PM | link