Re: [Caml-list] [ANN] OCaml-Java project: 1.0 release

[Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de>]

* Till Varoquaux:

> Anyways; here goes for trampolines (straight from wikipedia):
>
> "Used in some LISP implementations, a trampoline is a loop that
> iteratively invokes thunk-returning functions. A single trampoline is
> sufficient to express all control transfers of a program; a program so
> expressed is trampolined or in "trampolined style"; converting a
> program to trampolined style is trampolining. Trampolined functions
> can be used to implement tail recursive function calls in
> stack-oriented languages."

I'm not sure if this is this a universally understood term.  In GHC
land, this is called a "mini-interpreter".  The mini-interpreter doesn't
have to be *that* expensive if you can avoid consing, but this seems to
require whole-program analysis (or, at the very least, rather powerful
inter-procedural escape analysis).

I think I've heard this term mostly in the context of currying
(specifically, in the implementation of downward closures in languages
such as Ada).