The fundamental concept of continuations

[gnuist006 at gmail.com]

On Oct 9, 5:50 am, Matthias Blume <f... at my.address.elsewhere> wrote:
> "." <f... at bar.biz> writes:
> > On Tue, 09 Oct 2007 05:15:49 +0000, gnuist006 wrote:
>
> >> Again I am depressed to encounter a fundamentally new concept that I
> >> was all along unheard of. Its not even in paul graham's book where i
> >> learnt part of Lisp. Its in Marc Feeley's video.
>
> >> Can anyone explain:
>
> >> (1) its origin
> > One of the lambda papers, I think.  I don't remember which.
>
> This is a common misconception.  There is very little that
> originated from the "lambda" papers.  But they did a marvelous job at
> promoting some of the ideas that existed in the PL community for
> years.
>
> As for the concept of continuations, there is Scott and Strachey's
> work on denotational semantics, and there is Landin's J operator.
> (There's probably more that I am forgetting right now.)
>
> >> (6) any good readable references that explain it lucidly ?
>
> One of the most lucid explanations of definitional interpreters --
> including those that are based on continuation-passing -- are
> explained in J. Reynolds' famous 1971 "Definitional Interpreters for
> Higher-Order Functions" paper.  (It has been re-published in 1998 in
> HOSC.)  The paper also explains how to perform defunctionalization,
> which can be seen as a way to compile (and even hand-compile)
> higher-order programs.
>
> Matthias

Matthias, thanks for the reference, but I dont have access to an
engineering library. I would appreciate, if you have access to paper/
scanner or electronic copy to help many of us out, you are
not just helping me but many will thank you.