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Re: The Past, Present and Future of Continuations (was: Perl 6Summary)

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From:
Dan Sugalski
Date:
July 8, 2002 14:09
Subject:
Re: The Past, Present and Future of Continuations (was: Perl 6Summary)
Message ID:
a05111b08b94faf2c7589@[63.120.19.221]
At 2:43 PM +0100 7/8/02, Andy Wardley wrote:
>A short time ago, in a nearby  thread, Larry Wall wrote:
>>  Perhaps we should just explain continuations in terms of time travel.
>
>Funny.  I wrote a message to this effect the other night, but decided
>not to send it (too tired to decide if I was talking sense or nonsense).
>
>I was about to propose that 'continuation' is too long a word for lazy
>Perl folk to bandy around at will, and possibly too ivory tower for most
>people to grok.

The one problem with using time travel is that people will expect the 
values of their variables to go back to what they were when the 
continuation is taken, which they won't.

You could natter on about variables being embedded in a separate 
n-dimensional reference frame while the control-flow is a way to 
model multidimensional cross-universe tunnelling... but that'd 
probably be a bit confusing. :)
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk

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