# Continuations... again!

## Ivan Tomac — 2003-10-06 13:56:30

    Sorry, I know some of you must be getting sick of hearing about

    continuations by now ;)

    Yesterday I came across a paper

    (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/194483.html) that talks about adding new

    features (such as exceptions and continuations) to a combinator-based

    functional language without changing the language itself. The paper

    talks about the FL programming language

    (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/183013.html) which decended from Backus'

    FP but I think most of the stuff in there could be applied to Joy-like

    languages as well. Here's a quote from the paper:

    "Our technique is motivated by existing mechanisms for overloading

    functions... <snip>... Extending this idea, the programmer might

    redefine the primitive combining forms of the language - the "glue"

    with which programs are built - to realize language extensions."

    I found it a bit hard to read and I'm going to have to spend more time

    understanding all of that but it seems to be the most elegant way to

    add exceptions and continuations to a language that I've seen so far.

    Anyway I was wondering if anyone's seen that paper before and if

    anyone has any thoughts on that?

    Ivan