Lambda the Ultimate

Oleg provides various arguments against including call/cc as a language feature.

We argue against call/cc as a core language feature, as the distinguished control operation to implement natively relegating all others to libraries. The primitive call/cc is a bad abstraction -- in various meanings of `bad' shown below, -- and its capture of the continuation of the whole program is not practically useful. The only reward for the hard work to capture the whole continuation efficiently is more hard work to get around the capture of the whole continuation. Both the users and the implementors are better served with a set of well-chosen control primitives of various degrees of generality with well thought-out interactions.

We will be making this course, Brown's upper-level programming languages offering, available for free on the Web. People anywhere are welcome to view the lectures, read the materials, and do the assignments

This is a great opportunity! I have relied heavily on Shriram's lecture notes when I was starting out.

It is nice to see that he promises to give personal recognition for those who participate, and even has a system in place for giving partial credit to busy professionals who cannot spare the time to do all the assignments and projects.

My only misgiving is that the course uses Racket; I wish it was in Scheme.