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Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation
book

Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

by Saverio Perugini
December 2021
Beginner
840 pages
47h 29m
English
Jones & Bartlett Learning
Content preview from Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

13.2 First-Class Continuations

13.2.1 The Concept of a Continuation

The concept of a continuation is an important, yet under-emphasized and -utilized concept in programming languages. Intuitively, a continuation is a promise to do something. While evaluating an expression in any language, the interpreter of that language must keep track of what to do with the return value of the expression it is currently evaluating. The actions entailed in the “what to do with the return value” step are the pending computations or the continuation of the computation (Dybvig 2009, p. 73). Concretely, a continuation is a one-argument function that represents the remainder of a computation from a given point in a program. The argument passed to a continuation ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781284222739