Continuations

Continuations, as you recall, are a mechanism to resume processing with a known state. To implement that we need two things:

1. the state

2. where to resume

and…that’s it, which seems quite remarkable for something so powerful.

We should further distinguish between undelimited and delimited continuations. Few languages allow continuations at all because of their perceived danger (programmatic goto) and many Scheme users shy away from undelimited continuations in favour of delimited continuations – you can only jump back so far.

For further reading consider Oleg Kiselyov’s site on Continuations and Delimited Control.

Implementation

State

The obvious first question is what constitutes the program’s state? A second, less obvious, question is what does not constitute the program’s state?

In an ideal stack-oriented language all the program state would be on the stack so we could just stash a copy of that away and be done.

We don’t have an ideal stack-oriented language as, amongst other things, we stash values away in a per-function call frame. Clearly, for a function to resume it must have access to the frame (hierarchy) in order that it can continue to manipulate those values so it looks like we need to save the current frame as well. In practice, we would save the current top-level (module) as well, just like a function call saves and restores the frame and top-level.

The formal parameters in the frame might have an air of being read-only but in practice are mutable and so there is no useful way to create a snapshot of these values. Thus frames fall into a grey area where we can ensure that the restored structure is correct but we can’t be so sure about the values in them.

Finally, there are top-level values, globals if you like. We can’t do anything about them, they are what they when we resume. You can see here how globals (and frame parameters in our case) are considered even more harmful than usual. We (might) want to resume as was but can’t.

But wait, there is also the dynamic environment, the likes of the current input, output and error handles. These are state variables currently maintained in the current thread.

Where

The descriptions of continuations always makes an understanding of where a bit woolly. With our byte-coded VM, the where very simply becomes the next instruction after the body of the continuation.

We already have to handle this “instruction after” business with the implementation of if to allow us to jump over the one or the other clause depending on the result of the test clause.

However, in terms of the normal interface, call/cc, it is even easier still. The normal form is call/cc p where p is a unary procedure, ie. takes one argument which is the continuation.

So, p is an argument to call/cc and by the normal evaluation of arguments it will have been evaluated before call/cc is invoked. That means that the pseudo-byte code for:

call/cc p
...

looks like:

evaluate call/cc
push value
evaluate p
push value
create frame
pop-frame0           the value of p into frame slot 0
pop-function         the value of call/cc into func
invoke-function
...

But look, at the moment of running call/cc, at the invoke-function instruction, which is about to create a continuation which needs to know where to go “next” if the continuation is invoked, the place it needs to go “next” is the very next instruction. In other words, the PC that call/cc needs to save happens to be, uh, PC (because it is incremented after reading the instruction to invoke-function).

Here it doesn’t matter whether p is a predefined function or one you are declaring on the fly because of the way arguments are evaluated to return a function value. If p was a named function then evaluate p will cause a lookup of p and we’ll get back a function value.

If p was an on the fly function then evaluate p will result in a wall of code the end value of which is a function value.

Either way, evaluate p has resulted in a function value which we push onto the stack and later into the frame like any other value.

Operation

When we capture a continuation we need to stash a copy of the current stack. It must be a full copy, rather than a reference, as if future processing changes the stack then we won’t be restoring the stack as it was. In that sense it doesn’t matter if the restoration is larger or smaller than the current stack, ie. if we are heading out of the stack[sic] of function calls or heading back into the depths, we need a copy of the stack as was.

The obvious case is if we capture a continuation in the bowels of some function calls – a generator springs to mind – and then allow the function calls to unwind naturally. Had we only kept a reference to the stack then our continuation will now have a reference to a naturally unwound stack. Not very useful if we want to resume the generator! Of course, if it had made a copy of the stack at the time the continuation was captured then it can restore that stack trivially.

You can take the word “trivially” with a pinch of salt as copying the stack repeatedly isn’t a cheap operation. There’s a time and space penalty to using continuations.

We also need to stash the frame and current module. We could have called the standard idio_vm_preserve_state() except it modifies the stack – we don’t want the stack modified.

Instead we’ll just make the continuation object have references to all the objects of interest. The one exception is the stack which we will take a full copy of for full continuations. This allows us to independently reproduce the entire computing state (modulo frame contents and global values!) whenever requested even if the program had otherwise wound everything up.

I’ve also saved a reference to the current thread. We don’t have too many threads but we need to recover the right one when a continuation is invoked!

sigjmp_buf

There’s a minor addition to all this in the form of a C sigjmp_buf. When a file is loaded we get a new, nested sigjmp_buf and, therefore, if we need to unwind the program state we need to unwind to this correct sigjmp_buf.

The whole sigsetjmp(3) business could do with some clearer thinking!

C Implementation

The C data structure is, not surprisingly:

• the (full copy of the) stack

• the frame and current module

• current thread

• the PC

• the sigjmp_buf

plus the usual grey link for compound types:

typedef struct idio_continuation_s {
    struct idio_s *grey;
    idio_ai_t pc;
    struct idio_s *stack;
    struct idio_s *frame;
    struct idio_s *env;
    sigjmp_buf jmp_buf;
    struct idio_s *module;
    struct idio_s *thr;
} idio_continuation_t;

Invocation

Invoking a continuation requires that we identify the element in functional place as a continuation in idio_vm_invoke() (verifying there is a single argument) and call idio_vm_restore_continuation().

…and I have a number of bite marks to prove it!

Ooh err, missus

We must duplicate the continuation’s copy of the stack, rather than simply replace it, in case we re-use this continuation. I keep repeating that, it is important and you will get bitten if you don’t.

*

The verification of a single argument is a bit moot depending on whether we intend to use a Scheme-ish call-with-values. There are some details in Kent Dybvig’s chapter on Control in [Dyb09].

I’ve kept the test in as multiple values occurs where the native call/cc (actually %%call/uc) has been wrappered and therefore is a closure and won’t be passing through the code for invoking a (true) continuation value.

Where the native call is used then we will have a true continuation value and can apply the test.

dynamic-wind I

I’ve looked at a couple of implementations of dynamic wind.

The broad thrust of dynamic-wind is that you have three thunks, before, during and after. You run before as some sort of setup, during as the action part and, most importantly, always run after.

Here you’d also require that the variable referencing the file handle we’re opening, using and (always!) closing is in an appropriate scope.

Some syntax sugaring might help which leads to the

with fh as open-file-expression {
  do-something-with fh
}

forms.

The most common usage has after perform some cleanup operations. You might imagine that before arranged to open a file descriptor, during does something with the supplied file descriptor and after closes the file descriptor so we don’t have any operating system resource issues.

Clearly, if we have some issue in during then we want to ensure that after is always run.

I’ve always mis-read concomitant as co-committed but in fact it is from the Latin concomitant meaning ‘accompanying’ derived from concomitari, from con meaning ‘together’ and comitari from comes meaning ‘companion’.

I picked up on what I believe to be the R5RS description making dynamic-wind and call/cc concomitant. Further Intertube scrambling suggests that the reroot! function is using the Hanson-Lamping algorithm (see http://arclang.org/item?id=15536) from an unpublished 1984(?) paper.

R5RS says:

A state space is a tree with the current state at the root. Each node other than the root is a triple <before,after,parent>, represented in this implementation as two pairs:

((before . after) . parent)

Navigating between states requires re-rooting the tree by reversing parent-child links.

The code looks like:

dynamic-wind := #f

{
  *here* := list #f

  define (reroot! there) {
    if (not (eq? *here* there)) {
      reroot! (pt there)
      {
        before := phh there
        after := pth there
        set-ph! *here* (pair after before)
        set-pt! *here* there
        set-ph! there #f
        set-pt! there '()
        *here* = there
        (before)
      }
    }
  }

  orig-call/cc := call/cc

  call/cc = function (k-proc) {
    here := *here*
    orig-call/cc (function (k) {
                        k-proc (function results {
                                  reroot! here
                                  apply k results
                        })
    })
  }

  dynamic-wind = function (before during after) {
                   here := *here*
                   reroot! (pair (pair before after) here)
                   call-with-values during (function results {
                                              reroot! here
                                              apply values results
                   })
  }
}

Don’t worry about the call-with-values in dynamic-wind (it has also been concomitant’ed with call/cc!) as it’s just a means to bundle multiple values around as though they were one. The key point is that reroot! is called before extracting the values[sic] from results, themselves the results[sic] of invoking during.

By way of explanation, reroot! is playing a very dirty trick – the sort of thing it should be ashamed of and yet simultaneously is very clever. It is modifying the contents of *here* and there and then changing what *here* refers to which is critical because the callers of reroot! have generally taken a reference to *here* (as it was when they started).

The important part about reroot! modifying the contents is because of the eq? test. eq? will be testing the address in memory of the pairs and not the contents of the pairs. It is obviously true that if the two variables refer to the same address then they are the same. However, they no longer have the contents you first thought of.

The callers’ reference to *here* (usually called here) started as, probably, (#f . #n) but will become

((after . before) . orig-there)

and orig-there was itself

((before . after) . orig-*here*)

which means when the caller subsequently calls reroot! again with here they’re actually calling it with

((after . before) . orig-there)

which means the first thing reroot! does is call itself with (pt there), ie. orig-there.

But wait! orig-there was also modified by reroot! to be (#f . #n) which now eq? *here* because reroot! changed what *here* referred to as well (to orig-there in fact).

A pencil and paper and remembering that eq? for pairs is testing the location in memory and not the contents is the key, here.

Or admit defeat and simply believe it is true.

Don’t forget, if you’re remotely following, that any modification to there will affect all those who were referencing it as part of another data structure!

A neat side-effect of toggling the (after . before) pair is that reroot! will now blindly call (before) as previously but now before – (phh there) – is actually after.

Capiche?

This works for full continuations and is largely invisible other than for anyone paying careful attention to the continuation object they are passed which may now be a function. You still invoke it in the same way, k value, but k, here, is just a closure.

However I didn’t see much in terms of delimited continuations which I wanted to play with for some of the escapes we want to use.

Delimited Continuations

Delimited continuations differ from undelimited continuations by virtue of being, uh, limited in extent. It should come as no surprise that the theory is considerably more vexed than this but let’s not get side-tracked for a moment.

So now we looking at Oleg Kiselyov’s delim-control-n.scm which uses undelimited continuations to derive delimited continuations.

I’ve, *ahem*, “improved” that code slightly by constraining its elegant multi-faceted implementation (the original can be any of the Felleisen *F* operators) and bodging in tags.

Delimited continuations tend to be described in terms of two pairs of operators: prompt/control and reset/shift which differ in some quite subtle ways. They also capture a slightly obtuse continuation, the remainder of the prompt block after the control block (or the remainder of the reset block after the shift block).

I’ve seen reference to “over 700” delimited control operators – YMMV.

Otherwise, as the Guile manual notes there appear to be “a number” of delimited control operators to be enjoyed.

I’ve worded the extent of the continuation badly but let’s keep on and see where we get.

However, sticking with our two base control operators, for the sakes of argument they largely act the same in that you establish a start-of-continuation with prompt body (or reset body) and then in the body you can further establish the end-of-continuation with control k body (or shift k body).

The delimited continuation is the code inside prompt/reset and after control/shift – which isn’t immediately obvious:

prompt {
  prologue
  control k {
    control body
  }
  epilogue
}

From which the epilogue is the delimited continuation, invocable as k v within control body.

The overall premise is that prompt runs prologue and then the control block – and… that’s it. The result of prompt is whatever control returns as the control block is the last expression run in prompt.

If there wasn’t a control block in the prompt block then prompt would run prologue and epilogue. It is the presence of control that creates the weird behaviour.

The delimited continuation, epilogue or k, may or may not be run inside control. It may or may not be run multiple times inside the control block but epilogue is not run simply because it is inside the prompt block. It is up to the control block to decide if it wants to utilize the delimited continuation.

So for:

prompt {
  1 + (control k {
    k 3
  })
}

we get the continuation 1 + []. That might not be immediately obvious because of the infix operators. Consider:

prompt {
  + 1 (control k {
    k 3
  })
}

Here, the control block is an argument – and the second argument – to the + function. As argument processing is performed before the main function of an expression is invoked (duh!) then the continuation of the control block is the call to +.

Of interest, the first argument, 1, is processed first – sub-expressions in Idio are processed left to right – and so is only evaluated once. If we replaced 1 with a function call, say, (return-1), which printed out what it was doing before returning 1, it would only print out what it was doing once because calling the delimited continuation, the continuation of the second argument, happens after the first argument was processed.

The value passed will be whatever the invocation of the continuation in control’s body passes. In this case it is k 3 meaning the delimited continuation is invoked with 1 + 3. It will return that value back into control’s body which, in this case, promptly[sic] returns it.

Not invoking the continuation in the body of control means prompt will return whatever control returns (as the continuation body is not invoked – as you would hope). Hence:

prompt {
  1 + (control k {
    3
  })
}

without invoking k returns 3. This is the same behaviour as k 3 in the previous example, which, being the last expression, would have been the value 4, ie. control k 4 which means prompt returns 4.

prompt {
  1 + (control k {
    printf "(k 3) is %s\n" (k 3)
    9
  })
}

will, in combination, print (k 3) is 4 then return 9.

*

There is a subtlety, here, when using such trivial examples in that the continuation is rather precisely defined. What if we want a continuation of:

display "Hi Mum!\n"
1 + []

We, essentially, want to encompass all the expressions leading up to the start of what would have been the control expression.

The usual Schemely approach is to wrap such a group of expressions into a thunk to be evaluated “later”. We can see that in the syntactic sugar for control which wrappers an arbitrary set of expressions, e, into a function taking the name of the continuation, k, as an argument.

We should be able to do something similar here. Suppose we took our set of expressions and wrapped them up in a function that was waiting for a continuation value, [], to be passed, something like:

function ([]) {
  display "Hi Mum!\n"
  1 + []
}

and then made that whole expression a closed function call with the control expression as the argument:

(function ([]) {
  display "Hi Mum!\n"
  1 + []
}) (control k ...)

Hmm, it might just work!

prompt/control

The reduction rules for prompt essentially say that the original expression is rewritten:

prompt (delim-body (control k control-body))
prompt ((function (k) control-body) (function ([]) delim-body))

[] is not – or shouldn’t be – a valid identifier in Idio – I’m just trying to tie this description in with the commonly used notation for the value passed to a continuation.

The replacement expansion is slightly lost in Schemely parentheses. What it is saying is

prompt (closed-unary-function arg)

with arg itself being a unary function. Very confusing, very Schemey!

Ultimately, though, it means that the k in control-body is the function function ([]) delim-body such that when you call k v you will be passing v as the continuation value [], ie. the argument to delim-body.

From that you can also see that if the continuation k is not invoked then delim-body is not invoked and control-body’s returned value is what prompt will return.

Applying those reduction rules to our trivial example (and rewriting in a more Schemely fashion as it’s shorter!):

prompt (1 + (control k (k 3)))

apply the reduction rule
prompt ((function (k) (k 3)) (function ([]) (1 + [])))

substitute k in control-body
prompt ((function ([]) (1 + [])) 3)

substitute [] in delim-body
prompt (1 + 3)

...complicated maths...hang on!...
prompt 4

4

You can invoke the continuation more than once:

prompt (1 + (control k ((k 3) * (k 4))))

the invocations of k n are replaced with 4 and 5 and the result of control (and therefore prompt) is 20.

Note

This use of multiple invocations implies that delimited continuations must be implemented with undelimited continuations – or, at least, the underlying implementation copies the stack. Here, k is being used more than once so to be able to resume control-body with its deeper stack intact the underlying continuation must have saved it.

If you implement prompt/control using a “native” delimited continuation (which only remembers the height of the stack and not its contents) then when the code resumes the stack will be extended, rather than truncated, and the extra values are whatever the default value of an array element are (probably #f). The VM gets upset quite soon after that (noted the author).

I suppose you could implement such “native” delimited continuations as not simply remembering the height of the stack but rather the section of the stack that needs to be restored – a height plus stack segment.

You can have multiple controls which starts getting a bit more interesting:

prompt (1 + (control k1 (2 * (control k2 (k1 3)))))

Erm, OK.

To be fair, it’s not that hard!

Taking each control in turn:

• k1 has a

  • delim-body of 1 + [] and a

  • control-body of 2 * (control k2 (k2 3))

  noting that k1 isn’t used anywhere

• k2 has a

  • delim-body of 1 + (control k1 (2 * [])) and a

  • control-body of k2 3

k2 is invoked so we will run its delim-body, 1 + (control k1 (2 * [])). [] is 3 so we get 1 + (control k1 (2 * 3)) ie 1 + (control k1 6)

That control-body is interesting because it does not use k1. If you recall the reduction rules an unused k means that prompt returns whatever control returns and, critically, the delim-body is not run.

In other words, prompt returns 6.

OK, OK, I didn’t get it for a while either. We’re in a sort of theory stage, nod sagely and let’s move on.

Though, I confess it’s not something that’s immediately obvious.

Implementation

If we look at the implementation of Oleg Kiselyov’s prompt/control in Scheme it requires the maintenance of a list of “holes” (also confusingly called “cells”) each of which is a tuple of the continuation and a flag distinguishing control from shift (as they are otherwise identical). I’ve slightly reduced the code complexity by removing one of the variables that allows for more control operators (that we’re not interested in):

delim-control-n.scm

; This is one single global mutable cell
(define holes '())
(define (hole-push! hole) (set! holes (cons hole holes)))
(define (hole-pop!) (let ((hole (car holes))) (set! holes (cdr holes)) hole))

(define (cell-new v mark) (cons v mark))
(define (cell-ref c) (car c))
(define (cell-marked? c) (cdr c))

; Essentially this is the ``return from the function''
(define (abort-top! v) ((cell-ref (hole-pop!)) v))
(define (unwind-till-marked!)
  (if (null? holes) (error "No prompt set"))
  (let ((hole (hole-pop!)))
    (if (cell-marked? hole)          ; if marked, it's prompt's hole
      (begin
        (hole-push! hole)            ; put it back
        '())
      (cons hole (unwind-till-marked!)))))

(define (prompt* thunk)
  (call-with-current-continuation
    (lambda (outer-k)
      (hole-push! (cell-new outer-k #t)) ; it's prompt's hole
      (abort-top! (thunk)))))

(define (control* f)
  (call-with-current-continuation
    (lambda (k-control)
      (let* ((holes-prefix (reverse (unwind-till-marked!)))
             (invoke-subcont
               (lambda (v)
                 (call-with-current-continuation
                   (lambda (k-return)
                     (hole-push! (cell-new k-return is-shift))
                     (for-each hole-push! holes-prefix)
                     (k-control v))))))
        (abort-top! (f invoke-subcont))))))

(define (abort v) (control* (lambda (k) v)))

; Some syntactic sugar
(define-syntax prompt
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((prompt e) (prompt* (lambda () e)))))

(define-syntax control
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((control f e) (control* (lambda (f) e)))))

Where we start by declaring the (global) holes and then some push and pop operations on it and how to create a hole (or cell). We then get to the more interesting functions.

prompt* (the * because the code allows it to be either prompt or reset – technically, they are identical) pushes a hole/cell onto holes which contains its own continuation, [outer-k], and then calls abort-top! with the value from evaluating its thunk argument (ie. its body).

abort-top! will pop the topmost hole and extract the continuation from it (using cell-ref) and apply that continuation to abort-top!’s own argument, v.

So far, then, in the most trivial sense, if the body of prompt* didn’t do anything interesting, then the abort-top! in prompt* will pop prompt*’s own hole straight back off the list and thus invoke prompt*’s continuation, [outer-k], with the result of evaluating prompt*’s body. Thus, in a rather round-about manner, prompt* returns the result of evaluating its own body.

unwind-till-marked! pops holes until it finds a marked hole (ie. created by prompt – or shift, it turns out) and returns the popped list.

control* (the * because the code allows it to be either control or shift) is a bit more complicated. First of all it captures its own continuation as [k-control]. It then establishes the set of holes up to the nearest enclosing marked hole, ie. one created by prompt, and saves the reversed result as holes-prefix.

It then establishes a function, invoke-subcont which, if invoked, will capture its own continuation, pushing that onto the list of holes, immediately follow that with the (reversed!) list of holes (thus re-ordering it again) and invoke [k-control], the “parent” continuation with whatever value invoke-subcont was passed.

invoke-subcont is acting a bit like prompt* in pushing its own continuation onto the set of holes and then invoking a wider continuation on its argument but it also re-establishes the set of holes that were lying in between prompt* and control*. It’s a form of repeater, re-establishing the set of holes as was modulo the current invocation’s continuation.

Of course, invoke-subcont might not get invoked because it is just an argument passed to f the function passed to control*. The only thing we know for sure is that abort-top! is going to be called with the result of calling (f invoke-subcont). Don’t forget, invoke-subcont is just the name of a function and evaluating it will just result in a function value, nothing will be running it. (Not there, anyway.)

control*’s f, as we can see from the syntactic sugar for control, lower down, is a function derived from its arguments. If you recall the invocation of control it is something like control k ... where k is some named continuation and we can see through the syntactic sugar that that has been rewritten as control* (function (k) ...) thus making k a valid lexical name in ....

Again, in the most trivial case, with ... being a simple value, say, 3, then control*’s f is (function (k) 3).

Here, now, we see the more interesting part, from (f invoke-subcont), we can see that the argument k to control*’s f, that is control’s named continuation, is the function invoke-subcont. Although we’re not invoking k in this example so it doesn’t matter right now.

Instead, we run f, ignoring its argument k and return 3 which abort-top! then invokes with the continuation in the hole on the top of the list which, in our trivial case, should be prompt*’s. And so prompt* returns 3 in turn.

If we review an expanded invocation:

[outer-k] prompt (1 +
            [k-control] (control k 3)
       )
...

The prompt will establish its [outer-k] as whatever receives its value (here, the top level!). control will establish its [k-control] in the expression 1 + [k-control]. At the time control’s body is invoked, the list of holes only has prompt’s hole, [outer-k] on it.

Next, let’s have control use its continuation, k, say, (k 3). prompt sets up the same and now k, ie. invoke-subcont comes into play:

prompt (1 +
             (control k {
                          ...
                          k 3
                          ...
                        })
       )

As we run through control*, holes-prefix will be an empty list as there’s only prompt*’s hole on the list (and unwind-till-marked! puts it back). We then call k 3, ie. invoke-subcont 3 which establishes its own continuation, [k-return] and pushes a hole with that on the list and then pushes the (empty!) holes-prefix on as well. holes now looks like: (([k-return]) ([outer-k])) and the continuations look like:

[outer-k] prompt (1 +
            [k-control] (control k {
                                       ...
                                       [k-return] k 3
                                       ...
                                     })
       )

We now explicitly call [k-control] with v, ie. 3, in other words we’re now in 1 + [k-control] and the invocation of (thunk) in prompt* returns (with the value 4).

That value is passed to abort-top! as it was before but this time there is an extra hole on the list and abort-top! now invokes the continuation [k-return] with the value (4). That means we return into the body of control with the value (4 – still, phew!) which we, uh, discard.

In this case, the body of control continues with whatever the second ... is and the value from that is what is returned by (thunk) in prompt* (we are returning from a function call for the second time!) whereon abort-top! will invoke the continuation on top of the list which should be [outer-k] and so prompt will return the value from the second ....

There, easy peasy lemon squeezy!

However, let’s back up and look at another couple of examples.

In that last example, where we called k 3 and the code had returned 4 from (thunk) and abort-top! invoked [k-return] 4 then holes is back to a list with a single hole, from prompt*: (([outer-k])).

That is, of course, exactly the same state as when control’s body was first run. In other words, any subsequent call to k will be in the same state (of holes) as any other. Hence the example from much earlier where we called k multiple times:

prompt (1 + (control k ((k 3) * (k 4))))

Where each invocation of k will engineer a return back to its own continuation with whatever the computed value of delim-body is.

A more complicated case, without a useful example, is when holes-prefix does have a non-empty value.

Suppose holes was (somehow!) ((hole2) (hole1) ([outer-k])) when we start control. What happens then?

prompt {
        ...something adding holes...
        1 +
             (control k {
                          ...
                          k 3
                          ...
                        })
       )

(Technically the example above is missing some parentheses but… look! a pony!)

As we run through control*, holes-prefix will be the reverse of the holes in front of prompt*’s hole. It’ll be ((hole1) (hole2)) and holes is left with just (([outer-k])).

invoke-subcont is unchanged other than that holes-prefix now has a value.

control* then invokes (f invoke-subcont) as before and f, control’s body, trots along until it reaches k 3, ie. invoke-subcont 3.

invoke-subcont will push a hole with [k-return] on then push on the entries in holes-prefix (re-ordering them). That means that, , holes will be ((hole2) (hole1) ([k-return]) ([outer-k])).

We call [k-control] 3 as before which will return from (thunk) in prompt* and be passed to abort-top! which will pop the first hole off of the list, (hole2).

Yikes! What does that do? Something, I guess. You also get the impression that ((hole2) (hole1)) might well be of the same ilk as (([k-return]) ([outer-k])) which we know how they interoperate. It looks like ...something adding holes... was another prompt/control pair (albeit such that they don’t clash with our pair, somehow!).

So I think we expect that ((hole2) (hole1)) will unwind themselves leaving us with just (([k-return]) ([outer-k])) in holes which we know will unwind in due course.

prompt-at/control-at

control defines the end-of-continuation for the nearest enclosing prompt which seems a little limiting for when we get going as no doubt someone will throw an unfortunate prompt into control-body and mess the whole thing up.

We can fix that by generalising prompt/control to prompt-at tag/control-at tag allowing us to target specific marked sections (and where prompt/control are simple wrappers using some standard default tag).

The tags are just some entity differentiable by, say, eq?. So you could use symbols or maybe pairs or structures or something else.

for loop

You can now imagine how easy it might be to write a C-style for loop together with the control operators break and continue (here as a derivative of the Scheme do):

for-loop-break-tag := make-prompt-tag 'for-loop-break
(define-syntax break
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((break)   (break (void)))
    ((break v) (control-at for-loop-break-tag k v))))

for-loop-continue-tag := make-prompt-tag 'for-loop-continue
(define-syntax continue
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((continue)   (continue (void)))
    ((continue v) (control-at for-loop-continue-tag k v))))

define-template (for var-clauses test & body) {
  split :+ function (clauses vars inits steps) {
             cond ((null? clauses) (list vars inits steps)) \
                  ((or (not (pair? clauses))
                       (not (pair? (ph clauses)))
                       (not (symbol? (phh clauses)))
                       (not (pair? (pth clauses)))) (error 'for "invalid syntax" clauses)) \
                  (else (split (pt clauses)
                               (pair (phh clauses) vars)
                               (pair (phth clauses) inits)
                               (if (null? (ptth clauses))
                                   (pair (phh clauses) steps)
                                   (pair (phtth clauses) steps))))
  }

  for-loop := gensym 'for-loop
  var+init+step := split var-clauses '#n '#n '#n
  v := ph var+init+step
  i := pht var+init+step
  s := phtt var+init+step

  #T{
    {
      $for-loop :+ function $v {
                     prompt-at for-loop-break-tag {
                       (if $test {
                         prompt-at for-loop-continue-tag {
                           $@body
                         }
                         $for-loop $@s
                       })
                     }
      }
      $for-loop $@i
    }
  }
}

We start be defining a couple of break and continue tags (a prompt-tag is a simple structure) and some syntax to let us use, say, (break), itself transformed into (break (void)), in user code which is transformed into (control-at for-loop-break-tag k v).

The expected-to-be-unused k for break and continue should probably be gensym 'k to help debugging!

Note that these syntax transforms simply pass on v and, assuming it doesn’t contain k, means that the corresponding prompt-at will return v.

Of course, neither caller of prompt-at does anything with v in this loop as break and continue are C/Bash-type instructions and aren’t expected to be passing information around.

In the for template we split the variable initialisation and step clauses up so we can use them in the right place in the same way as Scheme’s do then the actual loop is simply augmented by a couple of extra prompt-at tag clauses so that any use of (break) or (continue) in body, transformed into (control-at tag k v) will jump around the loop as expected.

reset/shift

reset/shift differ very slightly from prompt/control in how the reduction rules are defined. Here, there is an extra reset around the captured continuation, delim-body:

reset (delim-body (shift k shift-body))
reset ((function (k) shift-body) (function ([]) (reset delim-body)))

What does that mean? Well, I confess, I’m a bit pushed to give a trivial example of why the difference is useful. In fact there is only a difference if there are two (or more) shift operators (like the multiple control operators example, above) where, in essence, the “inner” shift is unable to “see” the “outer” reset (the original one you typed, if you like) because the reduction rules have inserted an extra reset around the captured continuation.

dynamic-wind II

However, considerably more usefully we can look at Oleg Kiselyov’s dyn-wind.scm which uses reset/shift to first generate yield and then dynamic-wind.

An Idio port of the yield parts looks something like:

lib/delim-control.idio

yield-record-tag := make-ptag 'yield-record
define (make-yield-record v k) {
  list yield-record-tag v k
}

(define-syntax try-yield
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((try-yield exp (r on-r) (v k on-y)) {
      exp-r := exp
      if (and (pair? exp-r)
              (eq? (ph exp-r) yield-record-tag)) {
                v := pht exp-r
                k := phtt exp-r
                on-y
              } {
                r := exp-r
                on-r
              }
    })))

define (yield v) {
  shift k (make-yield-record v k)
}

First of all, yield, if invoked, is going to call shift k v where v is a yield record, a list of three items, magic v k:

• magic is just a magic number, here the name of a function, so we can subsequently identify such a yield record

• v is the value passed to yield so we can recover it

• The continuation of yield? Why, it has generator written all over it!

  k is the continuation created by shift so we can invoke it should we want to.

For the main thrust we’re defining a syntax template, try-yield, which looks a little confusing but has three arguments which I’ll describe in a slightly less confusing order which isn’t helped by meta-variable names being the same as variable names:

1. exp is some expression, to be evaluated, that might call yield

2. v k on-y says that if the exp, when evaluated, returns a yield record then create the variable v to be the saved v in the yield record, k to be the saved k in the yield record and then evaluate on-y which, presumably, will make use of those newly created variables.

   v and k are usually v and k and on-y is a suitably twisty expression that invokes k.

3. r on-r says that if the exp, when evaluated, is not a yield record then create a variable r to be the evaluated value of exp and then evaluate on-r which, presumably, will make use of this recently created value.

   It is quite often (r r) which is saying create the variable r (left hand one) with the value of exp and evaluate the expression r (right hand one) which, uh, returns us the value of exp.

yield and try-yield aren’t too tricky, albeit we could do with distinguishing between meta-variables, the r, v and k in the syntax expression try-yield from what will almost certainly be the supplied variable names r, v and k.

Now, before we move on we should note that try-yield and yield between them only mention shift. There’s no reset. Someone, somewhere, has to supply a suitably placed reset to make the whole thing work. Things start becoming less obvious with Kiselyov’s dynamic-wind replacement, dyn-wind-yield:

lib/delim-control.idio

define (dyn-wind-yield before-thunk thunk after-thunk) {
  dwy-loop :+ function (th) {
                (before-thunk)
                res := (th)
                (after-thunk)
                (try-yield res
                           (r r)                             ; return the result
                           (v k {
                             reenter := yield v
                             dwy-loop (function () {
                                         k reenter
                             })
                           }))
  }

  dwy-loop (function () {
              reset (thunk)
  })
}

dyn-wind-yield itself takes the expected before, during and after thunks. The main part of the function is the inner loop, dyn-loop which you can see invokes all three thunks in quick succession – albeit the during thunk is re-written as another thunk which calls reset around the original.

At this point it isn’t immediately obvious how simply invoking all three thunks in succession handles any errors (hint: it doesn’t, per se, but we’ll come back to that in a later section).

After all three thunks have been run we have a try-yield expression which uses the value returned from (th) as exp and the normal (r r) form for the result if not a yield and something a bit more complicated for the on-y expression.

Although the on-y expression has a bit of familiarity. In the first instance this will only be run if (th) (and thus the original (thunk)) called yield v with some v.

It collects the result of invoking yield v (with the same v) in reenter and invokes dwy-loop with a new thunk. That thunk, when called as (th), calls that original yield’s continuation (saved as k, you’ll recall) with reenter. (Whether the point where yield was originally called chooses to do anything with reenter is moot.)

Here, at this point, we can sort of envisage that, whatever was in the original thunk, we are now resuming where the call to yield was first made and passing it a continuation back to here. That’s a bit like the [k-control] and [k-return] business we saw earlier.

As a side-track, though, this re-invocation of dwy-loop will have run both before-thunk and after-thunk again. Are we really opening and closing file descriptors every time we run through the loop?

Yes, which is part of the debate about what dynamic-wind should be doing every time a protected block is re-entered. In this case, file descriptors are a bit who cares! as if we run out it’s our own (internal program logic) fault, usually. If we drop a connection to a busy network service every time we yield then life gets a bit more interesting and we’d be thinking of some more esoteric unwind-on-error which everyone will complain about because it doesn’t do what they want either.

Back on track, yield and try-yield look as though they work well in tandem though, of course, having to create an appropriate try-yield expression every time you want a generator might be asking for trouble.

“Native” Delimited Continuations

Whilst working through some ideas about delimited continuations I implemented some “native” delimited continuations in the sense that they only maintain the height of the stack, not a copy of the stack.

These are the sorts of things that are good for one-shot rewinds as they have no ability to re-create the stack as was, only to truncate it.

The problem is, though, what do we do with all the “holes” we’ve been creating? One the one hand, do we do any unwinding and on the other hand if we did revert the stack, presumably the “holes” were in some state at that time as well?

True enough to the latter question, so the “holes” become part of the dynamic state of the program and are stuffed away in the thread value. It also means that any continuation has to save (and restore when invoked) that list of holes as was for that moment in the program.

How to handle unwinding comes next.

Last built at 2025-10-29T07:10:53Z+0000 from 463152b (dev)