On 2021-06-12 19:49 +0200, Marc Nieper-Wißkirchen wrote:
> The efficiency improvements may be neglectable, but that has never been my
> main point.
>
> [snip]
>
> Semantically, the Maybe versions are certainly less primitive. A tail call
> in Scheme is just a goto. And this is what we want to algorithmically
> express.
>
> Wrapping everything in a Maybe just to decompose it, is a detour.

I apologize, since it seems that I haven't been following your
argument correctly.  I'll try to rephrase what I'm understanding from
you now:

Designs using Maybe *or* continuation passing are both "low-level", in
the sense that we have to pay attention to the book-keeping details of
how choices are made.  If CPS has an advantage over Maybe, it is
because it is the "more primitive" approach in Scheme.  The goal here,
however, is to provide procedures which high-level syntactic
abstractions can be expressed in terms of.

Is this at all accurate?

--
Wolfgang Corcoran-Mathe  <xxxxxx@sigwinch.xyz>

"I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design
to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed." --C.A.R. Hoare