Call-with-current-continuation

[ramsdell%linus@mitre-bedford.ARPA]

I told a white lie.  My worry about the way continuations are
perceived was generated from opinions expressed by a knowledgeable
computer scientist from Harvard, not by myself.  This person showed a
good understanding of continuations, but worried about the runtime
overhead incurred even when continuations are used to express control
patterns that can be implemented using constant space (or a stack).

Agreeing with Kent, I cannot think of any way to promise something
about the execution of certain simple uses of continuations.  I guess
we should leave the topic of how to use continuations to another
document.  

We've heard reviews of r3rs from knowledgeable users of Scheme, has
anyone received an opinion of the document from a reader that is
representative of the general programming language community?

John

PS.  Sorry about being sloppy about T's continuations.  T of 1981
restricted continuations to those that allowed stack allocation of
control structure.  You could not return from a continuation twice or
pass a continuation out of its defining environment.  Thus, a more
correct statement is that CATCH and call of a T continuation was
syntax for stack-based continuations.  In the interpreter, CATCH was
expanded to a lambda expression and a call to a procedure like
call-with-current-continuation, but the same restriction on the
continuations applied.