From: Patrick Hurley <phurley@...>
Date: 2006-11-01T06:35:56+09:00
Subject: Re: Concerns about removal of continuations in Ruby 2.0

On 10/31/06, Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@sun.com> wrote:
> limitations in mind, or I'd be using Groovy...but in this case the
> difficulty of implementing continuations efficiently, portably, and
> correctly with native threads and external libraries involved almost
> seems to outweigh their utility. But I'm not a language design maven, so
> I will not offer my opinion on whether continuations are a worthwhile
> feature. Suffice it to say I haven't seen any *practical* applications
> of continuations that couldn't be implemented in a less abstract (but
> possibly more verbose) way.

I will agree that they are rarely used (at least in Ruby), but for a
nice use case see wee (http://www.ntecs.de/blog-old/Wee) or Seeside
(in smalltalk, but more active: http://www.seaside.st/).

That being said, Matz's goal of delivering 1.9.1 without continuations
makes sense as they are rarely used in Ruby (possibly due to their
inefficiency and/or the richness of Ruby's existing flow control/block
semantics).

pth