Taylor Campbell's blag

Taylor Campbell's blag contains many insightful posts related to programming languages, Scheme in particular.

For example, he clears up my confusion about UNWIND-PROTECT vs Continuations:

The difference [to DYNAMIC-WIND] is in the intent implied by the use
of UNWIND-PROTECT that if control cannot re-enter the protected
extent, the protector can be immediately applied when control exits
the protected extent even if no garbage collection is about
to run finalizers.

Note that one cannot in general reconcile

(1) needing to release the resource immediately after control exits
the extent that uses it, and

(2) enjoying the benefits of powerful control abstractions such as
inversion of control.

However, if (1) is relaxed to

(1') needing to release the resource immediately after control
/returns normally from/ the extent that uses it,

then one can reconcile (1') and (2) by writing

(CALL-WITH-VALUES (LAMBDA () <resource-usage>)
  (LAMBDA RESULTS
    <resource-release>
    (APPLY VALUES RESULTS))), or simply

(BEGIN0 <resource-usage> <resource-release>)

using the common name BEGIN0 for this idiom.  (In Common Lisp, this
is called PROG1.)

(And Dorai Sitaram says: UNWIND-PROTECT "cannot have a canonical, once-and-for-all specification in Scheme, making it important to allow for multiple library solutions".)