Continuation - History

History

The earliest description of continuations was made by Adriaan van Wijngaarden in September 1964. Wijngaarden spoke at the IFIP Working Conference on Formal Language Description Languages held in Baden bei Wien, Austria. As part of a formulation for an Algol 60 preprocessor, he called for a transformation of proper procedures into continuation-passing style.

Christopher Strachey, Christopher P. Wadsworth and John C. Reynolds brought the term continuation into prominence in their work in the field of denotational semantics that makes extensive use of continuations to allow sequential programs to be analysed in terms of functional programming semantics.

Steve Russell invented the continuation in his second Lisp implementation for the IBM 704, though he did not name it. However there is no cross references about that and the given reference is a mere claim.

A complete history of the discovery of continuations is given by (Reynolds 1993).

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