Continuations: The Swiss Army Knife of Flow Control

In this talk, we are discussing a programming construct called "continuations," which essentially allow points in your program to be saved and returned to at a later point. We are also discussing the many different flow control operators that can be built from this tool, including exception handling, multithreading, and logic programming.

[rstewart]

Great video; thanks for helping us humble programmers get to a better understanding of continuations!

It’s a bit confusing in some places, though, when you say “stack frame, ” and you are actually talking about the entire stack.

That is minor, keep doing what you are doing; fantastic stuff, good work!

[catonano]

This talk is really eye opening. Thank you

It'd be nice if you would do a tour of what delimited continuations are and what advantages they offer

[fgngejw]

cool explanation. this guy has probably mentioned this book: "Essentials of Programming Languages" by D. Friedman and M. Wand, 3rd ed.

[firalanger]

‪2:33 - The order the sub-expressions are evaluated (i.e. executed) is undefined, but the order of the values of these sub-expressions is defined.

(f (g) (h))

might run "g" first or might run "h" first, but the value of the application (i.e. execution) of the procedure "g" (i.e. "(g)") will always be the first argument, and "(h)" will always be the second argument to the application of the function "f".

[acobster]

This is great but why would you animate a stack going down?? Sorry for nitpicking but the visual metaphor is kind of an important piece to understanding stacks. Anyway good talk regardless.

[halfsourlizard]

Is 'flow control' similar to what normal people and computer scientists call 'control flow'?

[NikolajLepka]

ngl, I kinda hate the (define foo (lambda x ...)) style some schemers write, why not just do the shorter (define (foo x) ...) instead?

[ThePandaGuitar]

It’s like JavaScript ;) This is all nice, but what is the performance like?

[jimnewton]

There is no such word "parenthesee". The singular form of parentheses is parenthesis, not parenthesee.