functional programming

[Tim Peters]

[posted & mailed]

[Christian Tismer, musing about applying continuations to the task of
 creating explictly hand-optimized tail calls, and then to recursive
 nested functions]

> ...
> It is easy to do this, and an apply would be easy as well.
> I'm just curious about the interface: It is hard to find
> the right names for these functions.
> Also, they don't appear to belong to the continuation
> module, so I hesitate to embed them there and also hesitate
> to write another extension module.
>
> Stackless Python can stand all kinds of jumps and calls,
> anywhere, at any time. The problem is just how to spell it.
>
> Suggestions?

Yes:  in the absence of a killer app, it's a distraction.  Piling more &
more things (that a relatively very few) people miss from Scheme onto your
Stackless doesn't make the latter more attractive to most people, and--
unless I miss my bet badly --especially not to Guido.  It just (at this
stage) complicates your story to no demonstrably good end.  KISS applies to
social politics as well as to code <0.4 wink>.

python-itself-is-subversive-and-stackless-should-be-too-ly y'rs  - tim