Re: Guile and MS-Windows on Major Govt. Project...

[Ken Anderson]

At 10:30 PM 7/5/2002, Chris Bitmead wrote:


> > > Yeah, ok well they should be considered. But jscheme is an interpreter 
> > > within an interpreter == unnecessarily slow. None of them technically 
> > > are Scheme (no call/cc, blurry picture on full tail calls etc).
> >
> >
> > I'm curious what you actually want to have full call/cc for - except as a 
> > "check-off (completeness) item.
>
>
> As far as I know, I don't. Does anyone know prior to starting a project if 
> it is needed? Also, what if I pull in an external library that uses it? 
> Ok, I'm not quite experienced enough in Scheme to know how likely that is.


I'm a beginner too, having only done Scheme for the past 4.5 years.  To 
make it worse, my scheme never had call/cc, so i never learned how to take 
advantage of it. My current belief is that if your Scheme has full call/cc, 
you just use it.  If it doesn't, you make do without it, because that's 
what you do in any language that's missing the feature you want.

Dick Gabriel made a comment about Scheme once, that suggested to me that 
without call/cc Scheme is relatively easy to implement in languages like C 
and Java.  Requiring call/cc is an extra step in language 
implementation.  Probably a step as least as large as requiring 
GC.  Perhaps we are currently more willing to live without call/cc than we 
are about living without GC.

We need to provide good examples of using call/cc, so that future 
implementations will be more willing to provide it.