13.6 Control Abstraction
Granting a programmer access to the underlying continuation in the interpreter in the presence of heap-allocated activation records empowers the programmer to implement a wide range of control structures. In this section, we demonstrate control abstraction through first-class continuations—an essential ingredient for control abstraction in programming languages. Control abstraction refers to the facilities and support that a language provides the programmer to concretely model and manipulate the control of a program (e.g., goto in C). Facilities for affecting the control of a program can be categorized by the scope of program control they affect: local (e.g., sequence, conditionals, and repetition) or global (e.g., ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access