[Haskell-cafe] Re: Can this be done?

[Chung-chieh Shan]

wren ng thornton <wren at freegeek.org> wrote in article <4993BBEE.9070603 at freegeek.org> in gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe:
> It's ugly, but one option is to just reify your continuations as an ADT, 
> where there are constructors for each function and fields for each 
> variable that needs closing over. Serializing that ADT should be simple 
> (unless some of those functions are higher-order in which case you run 
> into the same problem of how to serialize the function arguments). In 
> GHC's STG machine this representation shouldn't have much overhead, 
> though it does require the developer to do the compiler's job.

FWIW, this idea is called defunctionalization (due to Reynolds),
and it works for higher-order functions as well (because you can
defunctionalize those function arguments in the same way).

People in many fields put a lot of effort into turning their programs
into state machines...

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