[Python-ideas] yield from multiple iterables (was Re: The async API of the future: yield-from)

[Guido van Rossum]

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 3:49 PM, Steve Dower <Steve.Dower at microsoft.com> wrote:
> Alertable I/O (<http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/aa363772.aspx>) and overlapped I/O are two alternatives to IOCP on Windows.
>
>>> I agree [continuation] shouldn't be used as a synonym for "task", though.
>>> In any of its forms, a continuation isn't an entire task, it's
>>> something that you call to cause the resumption of a task
>>> from a particular suspension point.
>>
>> I guess that was just Steve showing off. :-)
>
> Not intentionally - the team here that did async/await in C# talks a lot about "continuation-passing style", which is where I picked the term up from. I don't use it as a synonym for "task" - it's always meant the "bit that runs after we come back from the yield" (hmm... I think that definition needs some work...).

Yeah, I have the same terminology hang-up with the term
"continuation-passing-style" for web callbacks.

Reading back what you wrote, you were indeed trying to distinguish
between the "callback" (which you consider the thing that's directly
invoked by the OS) and "the rest of the task" (e.g. the code that runs
when the yield is resumed), which you were referring to as
"continuation". I'd just use "the rest of the task" here.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)