Procedure proposal: call-with-escape-procedure

[Martin Grabmueller]

Hello list,

I often find an escape procedure useful when writing Scheme code, such
as for early exits on success, on error or for other reasons.  Since
`call/cc' is too general (and too expensive in Guile), and using
`catch' and `throw' is too clumsy for my taste, I tried to find a
better and generally useful alternative.

Therefore I propose to include the following procedure into ice-9:

(define (call-with-escape-procedure proc)
  (letrec ((key (gensym "call/ec"))
           (escape (lambda val (throw key val))))
    (catch key
           (lambda () 
             (proc escape))
           (lambda (k val-list)
             (apply values val-list)))))

(define call/ec call-with-escape-procedure)

`call/ec' calls `proc' and passes it an escape procedure, which, when
called with arbitrarily many arguments, will pass these arguments to
the continuation of the call to `call/ec'.  When the escape procedure
is called from another dynamic scope than from inside the
corresponding call to `call/ec', an exception is thrown.  Note that
the continuation for the call to `call/ec' must expect as many values
as passed to the escape procedure.

If nobody objects, I would like to add this procedure to a new module
in the ice-9 directory called (ice-9 call-ec).  Maybe it would be
useful to load the module by default too, but YMMV.

Regards,
  'martin