Re: coroutines and continuations ( in Python? - long discussion )

Steven D. Majewski (sdm7g@elvis.med.virginia.edu)
Thu, 5 May 1994 12:07:45 -0400

On May 4, 23:32, Tim Peters wrote:
>
> Two things I took from Guido's responses:
>
> 1) Your original problem (redirecting the "write" output from one
> function to the "read" input of another, in pipe-like fashion) would
> be easy to solve using threads (i.e., by binding stdin & stdout to a
> pair of "get" and "put" methods much like the methods of that name in
> Guido's Generator class).

However, one of my other points burried somewhere in that discussion
was that threads could be supported more portably by building
coroutines into the interpreter virtual machine. Python byte-code
instructions and builtin-C functions would then be 'atomic'. ( This
has some good and some bad implications, which I haven't thought thru
yet. ) Whether a coroutine/continuation syntax should show thru to the
Python language level is another question. I'm interested in exploring
that option, but the two questions are independent.

> 2) General continuations may be much harder to implement than we thought,
> because the state of the _C_ runtime stack is also part of the current
> continuation, and that's hard to muck with short of low-level OS- and
> machine-specific hacks. I can picture an elaborate scheme to worm
> around that, also using threads, but ...

But that's the point: because C-functions and python byte-code
instructions are atomic, the _C_ runtime stack is NOT a part of the
context or current continuation - only the Python block and argument
stacks and the current byte-code instruction pointer. We only have to
keep state for the virtual machine - that's what makes it portable.

> Disagree with either of those?

Yes. [ see above! ]

> The more I see of general continuations
> the less I want to see them as part of Official Python, but I do think
> they'd be fascinating to play with. I've been surprised before!

I've finished my sci-fi book, so my silence on these matters has been due
mostly to the fact that I'm actually tring to figure out an implementation so
I CAN play with it. If I give up on coroutines and/or continuations in
the *language*, my fall back is to try to support portable threads via
this mechanism.

- Steve Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics