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