[Haskell-cafe] Re: Playing with delimited continuations

[Claus Reinke]

> Anyhow, thanks for the input, and the pointers to the papers and such (and 
> writing so many of them in the first place. :) Incidentally, I really enjoyed 
> your "Delimited continuations in operating systems" paper. Reading that one 
> really made things click for me as to how delimited continuations can 
> actually show up in real systems, as opposed to just being an esoteric, 
> abstract construct).

i'd like to chime in there!-) just as i hadn't been comfortable with
call/cc before someone made the link to negation, i hadn't been
thinking much about delimited continuations before your paper
made the (now obvious;-) connection to (nested) evaluation 
contexts, which i tend to use all the time. sometimes, such 
simple connections are all that is needed.

btw, for me call/cc and delimited continuations, in contrast to
continuations in general, were not esoteric, abstract, but 
entirely too pragmatic, looking like powerful hacks, able to 
be bent to any purpose, seemingly lacking in foundations,
though not in applications.

makes me wonder if non-haskellers see monads and
monadic i/o in the same way as non-schemers see 
continuations and call/cc (the one too abstract, the other
too hacky?-).

thanks,
claus