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Showing posts from November, 2008

Trampolining for recursion...

In essence, CPS (continuation passing style) is a method of calling functions where instead of returning a value, you pass the results to another function (the continuation) provided as an argument. I wont go too deep into the reasoning behind this, as it's usually not used directly but rather as a middle representation of programming languages by some compiler/interpreter (read more on the wikipedia link). The big downside is that you're bombarding the stack with function frames for every call, going deeper and deeper, but never returning (you just keep passing what would be the return value to another function). One nifty method of avoiding this is to use a trampoline . A trampoline resembles a stream/lazy-list to anyone who's read SICP . Essentially, instead of calling functions from within another function, you return a bounce "call" to the trampoline which makes the call for you, doing the same with the return value of that call until it gets a land (a non-