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away from interpreter hacking and toward enhancing stdlib

Andrew Kuchling writes:

I'd like to suggest that we should retarget Python's development, away from interpreter hacking and toward enhancing and expanding the standard library. The idea is simple, but has far-reaching consequences for the development process; I think that on balance the consequences would be positive. The proposal: We should deflect effort away from language changes and redirect them toward the standard library.

...

... I find the new language features added in 2.4 unimpressive and not likely to be useful to me.

By el-vadimo at 2004-10-05 02:12 | LtU Forum | 1 comment | other blogs | 6422 reads

Ken Shan: Shift to Control

Ken Shan's Shift to Control (slides) presented at the recent Scheme workshop.

Ken shows that shift/reset, prompt/control, prompt/cupto and lots of other delimited continuation operators are all equally expressible, and all can be modeled by ordinary CPS.

The paper shows that shift and reset can macro-express control and prompt, as well as the other operators, without capturing undelimited continuations or keeping mutable state. This translation is previously unknown in the literature.

Good stuff! But keep in mind that, as the cartoon in the slide says, control operators can make your head hurt...

By Ehud Lamm at 2004-10-05 09:01 | Theory | 20 comments | other blogs | 14776 reads