Continuation tutorials timeline

This is a comprehensive timeline of continuation tutorials and related articles.

Please update this list as it becomes outdated! If you find a tutorial, article, post, comment, or message that stands on its own as an explanation of continuations, then please take a moment to paste the link somewhere on this page (register a throwaway account, if you prefer). The date, author, and blurb can be added later. This will greatly help others who are using this list as a resource for learning about continuations.

year 2002

2002-09 - CS590S: Lecture Notes 4 - Continuation-Passing Style
"Continuation-passing style or CPS is a technique for implementing functional programs in which procedures are written so that they receive procedural arguments representing their future behavior"

year 2004

2004-12 CSE 341: Scheme: Continuations and exceptions
"An expression's continuation is "the computation that will receive the result of that expression"."

year 2009

2009-06 F#: Continuation Passing Style - Mark Needham
"As I understand it we can achieve a continuation passing style of programming by passing in the bit of code that we went executed next (i.e. the continuation) as an argument to a function."

2009-12 Continuations by example: Exceptions, time-traveling search, generators, threads, and coroutines - Matt Might
"Concretely, a continuation is a procedure that represents the remaining steps in a computation."

2009-12 Continuations Made Simple and Illustrated - Denys Duchier

year 2010

2010-03 Computer Science 152 - References; Continuation passing style
"Intuitively, a continuation represents “the rest of the program.”"

2010-11 - By example: Continuation-passing style in JavaScript - Matt Might

year 2011

2011-06 2.9. Continuations and Continuation Passing
"A continuation is a callback function k that represents the current state of the program’s execution."

year 2012

2012-06 Asynchronous programming and continuation-passing style in JavaScript - Axel Rauschmayer

year 2013

2013-07 The Racket Guide: 10.3 Continuations
"A continuation is a value that encapsulates a piece of an expression’s evaluation context."

2013-05 School of Haskell: Understanding Continuations
"In essence, a continuation is a function which represents the next block of code to be executed."

2013-09 CS421: MP 4 – Continuation-Passing Style
"A function that is written in continuation- passing style does not return once it has finished computing. Instead, it calls another function (the continuation) with the result of the computation."

year 2014

2014-05 Why Are Continuations So Darn Cool? - Daniel Martins
"A continuation can be viewed as the evaluation context surrounding an expression or, in other words, a snapshot of the current control state of the program."

year 2018

2018-12 Removing a recursion in Python, part 2 - Eric Lippert
"The “continuation” in “continuation passing style” just means “what happens after”; the code that happens after a bit of code is the continuation of that code in your program."

year 2019

2019-06 Continuation Passing Style in Scheme
"The continuation k contains the code that will be executed after (+ x y) is calculated."

2019-08 What is a continuation? - Eric Normand
"Continuations have to do with how functions are called and then returned."

year 2020

2020-01 A Gentle Run-through of Continuation Passing Style and Its Use Cases - Ziyang Liu
"In CPS, instead of returning some value, the function would take a continuation function, which represents what the caller would do with the returned value"

2020-03 Continuations - Michael Erdmann
"What is a continuation? A function, used as a parameter by another function, and typically used to abstract away from “the rest of the computation”, or “what to do to ﬁnish a task”."

2020-05 Understanding Recursion and Continuation with Python - Nick Mose
"A continuation is an abstract representation of the control state of a program."

2020-09 Lecture #19: Continuations
"Intuitively, a continuation represents “the rest of the program.”"

2020-09 Continuations - Ernesto Hernández-Novich
"... a «continuation» is: some sort of snapshot of the current «interesting values» and immediate «next step»."

year 2021

2021-01 ontinuations FAQ (epoq diary 013) - Carl Mäsak
"The continuation represents a running program at some point during its run."

2021-03 Continuations in Scala
"The main idea of continuations ... is the ability to interrupt a program, save its control state, and resume it at a later point in time."