Abstract

Like—say—Concurrency, Continuations are a long standing, well researched topic of vast applications. They are used in compiler construction, distributed systems, and to give semantics to imperative control operators—and in many other situations.

However, much like Concurrency, Computer Scientists want nothing to do with them. Why? Simply put, Continuations encapsulate the future operation of a program—and by giving access to them, programs are free to do the most devilish of things if proper care is not taken.

This lecture will explore ways to tame this—proverbial—beast. We will first explain what Continuations are; how they can be used to implement different programming paradigms; and even how they enable us to write more efficient programs.