Continuation Passing Style
Synopsis
You have seen, especially in the Higher Order Functions
lecture, how we can use functions to generalize an operation. Continuations are
another example of this. Many languages have a return keyword to tell the
program to return from a function call with a certain result. What if you could
replace that with a parameter of your own choosing? The result is called a
continuation, and they have enormous power over the execution flow of a
program.
These may well seem abstract to you, but you will recognize them if you ever program in
languages like