Lambda the Ultimate

I've made a major update to the Cat manual and posted a new version of the Cat interpreter and source code which is now compatible with Mono (but so far only tested on Mono 1.13.8 under Windows XP). The type checker / type inference engine is now much more mature and well-tested.

The Cat interepreter and source code is all released entirely into the public domain.

Any comments, suggestions, or bug reports much appreciated!

Practical OCaml. Joshua Smith.

Apress has recently published a "mainstream" book (in English!) on OCaml. Here is an interview with the author, on a Ruby blog, of all places. I haven't seen the book yet, but will certainly buy it. If it's as good as Practical Common Lisp and generates as much buzz, this will be a very nice thing.

My language of choice for everyday coding is EcmaScript, thus I am very interested in everything new in this area. I'm mostly happy with the language, the only thing I miss in it seems to continuation support. I need them to simplify my work with asynchronous processing, that seems to happen very often in my development. I want them in order to convert this async processing to look like synchronous.

So for example when I need to perform a bunch of animations one after one I have to write just

for(var i=0;i<animations.length;i++)
  performAmination(animations[i])

What I need to write now instead is some hard to understand code.

Another asynchronous thing is communication with server (AJAX).

var someResult = serverProxy.callSomeFunc(arg);
var otherResult = serverProxy.callOtherFunc(someResult+1);

Now I am writing this in CPS stile, but it is a bit tedious.

serverProxy.callSomeFunc(arg,function(someResult){
  serverProxy.callOtherFunc(someResult+1, function(otherResult){
  //process something here
  });
})

With continuations I could hide all the async-sync conversion in proxy and all the code will just use it in synchronous way.
So basically, I want SJAX instead of AJAX :-)

I know that JavaScript 1.7 in Firefox 2.0 supports yield keyword and generators.
But I do not know whether it is possible to achieve such kind of conversion using only yield. So that is my first question - is that possible at all.

Rhino already has full continuations support, and such things is possible to do in Rhino, but there is no Rhino in web-browser and in Flash player.

And second question is - does somebody know whether ES4 will support continuations or just yield. Somewher I read that Brendan Eich promised continuations, but I didn't find this in ES4 draft.