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From: oliver@karakorum.berkeley.edu (Oliver Sharp)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: what do you use continuations for?
Message-ID: <11173@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 15 Feb 91 19:05:15 GMT
Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU
Reply-To: oliver@karakorum.berkeley.edu (Oliver Sharp)
Organization: University of California at Berkeley
Lines: 18

I have a question for the group: what do you use cwcc for?  I taught
a course out of Abelson & Sussman and, among other digressions,
introduced the notion of an explicit continuation.  The first question
everyone asks after getting some grip on what's going on is: so what
is this useful for?  Here are some answers that I've used:
  - you can freeze a big complicated recursively nested computation
      and stash it somewhere, so you can continue it later
  - it's easy to write coroutines
  - you can implement catch-throw very inefficiently

But I have to confess that I've never actually used cwcc in a real
program that was trying to get something done.  Have you?  What for?

Just curious ...
- Oliver

P.S.  I certainly found CPS to be a very handy way to analyze Scheme
code while putting together a Scheme compiler, but that's different.