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.
Comments
On May 25, 2006 8:08 PM, Stefan Tilkov
said:
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).
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.