Is it possible to implement coroutines using only LISP primitives?

Question

First, I'm a LISP newbie.

What I want to get is a cooperative micro-threading feature. And this can be gained with coroutine. As I know, Scheme supports coroutines via continuations. However, not all Scheme implementation may have continuations. If so, can I add a continuation feature with only LISP primitives?

@Svante Mainly Scheme, but possibly any kind of LISP. I talked about LISP 'primitives' which any LISP has. I wanna challenge to make own implementation if I could :) — eonil, Aug 10 '10 at 00:57
Ah. Well, I thought that you might mean some ancient dialect, one from the time where people still spelt it in all capitals. — Svante, Aug 10 '10 at 02:08

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 09 '10 at 04:43

5

You can. Chapters 5 and 6 of Essentials of Programming Languages shows how to implement continuations in Scheme. In his book On Lisp, Paul Graham explains how to implement continuations in Common Lisp (Chapters 20-22).

answered Aug 09 '10 at 04:43

Vijay Mathew

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These 'continuations' for CL are relatively limited, I'd think. – Rainer Joswig Aug 09 '10 at 07:07
@Rainer Can I know about the limitation? – eonil Aug 09 '10 at 08:22
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@Eonil On Lisp contains an implementation of multi-threading on continuations, so co-routines also might be possible with that implementation. – Vijay Mathew Aug 09 '10 at 10:46

Is it possible to implement coroutines using only LISP primitives?

1 Answers1