Abstract
Progress in programming language design has often been achieved by making an abstraction a “first class object”, one that can be passed to and returned from procedures and entered in data structures. For example, the importance of functional parameters has long been recognized, though it is only more recently that actor semantics [2] and object oriented programming have demonstrated the power of first class functional objects. This paper illustrates, with a novel example, the power of first class control objects, called continuations.
First Class Continuations are described, and a means for their explicit access is defined by a meta-circular interpreter. We pose and solve the “Devils and Angels Problem” that utilizes the indefinite extent of continuations. Some ramifications of continuations with respect to language implementation and non-blind backtracking are presented.
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References
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© 1984 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Friedman, D.P., Haynes, C.T., Kohlbecker, E. (1984). Programming with Continuations. In: Pepper, P. (eds) Program Transformation and Programming Environments. NATO ASI Series, vol 8. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46490-4_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46490-4_23
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-46492-8
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