"Building a backtracking facility in smalltalk without kernel support"[1]
Languages like Snobol, Prolog, and Icon were designed with backtracking facilities from the outset and these facilities are deeply intertwined with the implementation. Retrofitting a backtracking facility in a language that wasn't designed for it has never been achieved. We report on an experiment to retrofit Smalltalk with a backtracking facility. The facility is provided through a small number of primitives written in the language (no modifications to the kernel were made). The ability to do this is a direct result of the power provided by the objectification of contexts.
There's tons of other examples, for example various distributed objects mechanisms, my own Higher Order Messaging [2] the way Gemstone creates queries from procedural selection code etc.
"Building a backtracking facility in smalltalk without kernel support"[1]
Languages like Snobol, Prolog, and Icon were designed with backtracking facilities from the outset and these facilities are deeply intertwined with the implementation. Retrofitting a backtracking facility in a language that wasn't designed for it has never been achieved. We report on an experiment to retrofit Smalltalk with a backtracking facility. The facility is provided through a small number of primitives written in the language (no modifications to the kernel were made). The ability to do this is a direct result of the power provided by the objectification of contexts.
There's tons of other examples, for example various distributed objects mechanisms, my own Higher Order Messaging [2] the way Gemstone creates queries from procedural selection code etc.
[1] https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=62084.62094
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higher_order_message