Continuations and coroutines

ABSTRACT

The power of first class continuations is demonstrated by implementing a variety of coroutine mechanisms using only continuations and functional abstraction. The importance of general abstraction mechanisms such as continuations is discussed.

REFERENCES

• 1: Melvin E. Conway, Design of a separable transition-diagram compiler, Communications of the ACM, v.6 n.7, p.396-408, July 1963 [doi>10.1145/366663.366704]
• 2: Dahl O.-J., and Hoare, C.A.R. "Hierarchical Program Structures," Structured Programming, Dahl, O.-J., Dijkstra, E., and Hoare, C.A.R., Academic Press, 1972, pages 157-220.
• 3: Friedman, D.P., Haynes, C.T., Kohlbecker, E., and Wand, M. "The Scheme 84 Reference Manual" Indiana University Computer Science Department Technical Report No. 153 (March, 1984).
• 4: Hewitt, C. "Viewing control structures as patterns of passing messages", Artif. Intell. 8, 1977, pages 323-363. Also in Winston and Brown {ed}, Artificial Intelligence: an MIT Perspective, MIT Press, 1979.
• 5: P. J. Landin, Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation: part I, Communications of the ACM, v.8 n.2, p.89-101, Feb. 1965 [doi>10.1145/363744.363749]
• 6: Marlin, C. Coroutines: A Programming Methodology, a Language Design and an Implementation, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 95, Springer-Verlag, 1980.
• 7: John C. Reynolds, G/EDANKEN—a simple typeless language based on the principle of completeness and the reference concept, Communications of the ACM, v.13 n.5, p.308-319, May 1970 [doi>10.1145/362349.362364]
• 8: John C. Reynolds, Definitional interpreters for higher-order programming languages, Proceedings of the ACM annual conference, p.717-740, August 01-01, 1972, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/800194.805852]
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.3 Language Constructs and Features
          Subjects: Coroutines

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.3 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
      D.3.2 Language Classifications

          Nouns: Core

General Terms:
Languages