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CS 15-212: Fundamental Structures of Computer Science II |
Continuations act as "functional accumulators." The basic idea of the
technique is to implement a function f by defining a
tail-recursive function f' that takes an additional
argument, called the continuation, which represents the
computation that should be done on the result of f. In
the base case, instead of returning a result, we call the
continuation. In the recursive case we add whatever computation should
be done on the result to the continuation.
Continuations can be used to advantage for programming solutions to a variety of problems. In today's lecture we'll look at a simple example where continuations are used to efficiently manage a certain pattern of control. We'll see a related and more significant example in an upcoming lecture when we look at regular expressions.