From Newsgroup: comp.programming

Donald Knuth has been documenting and investigating programming
techniques forever in his monumental set called ``The Art of Computer Programming''. I suppose he must have in his own terms what is now
called continuations. In which part section of which book is the Scheme call/cc primitive studied?
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From Newsgroup: comp.programming

Anton Antimo <[email protected]> wrote or quoted:

Donald Knuth has been documenting and investigating programming
techniques forever in his monumental set called ``The Art of Computer >Programming''. I suppose he must have in his own terms what is now
called continuations. In which part section of which book is the Scheme >call/cc primitive studied?

Scheme's call/cc is a high-level language programming con-
struct outside the scope of Knuth's assembly-based approach.
However, coroutines are treated in Volume 1, section 1.4.2.

"call/cc" could be treated in volume 7 "Compiler Techniques",
but volume 7 is still decades away.


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From Newsgroup: comp.programming

Anton Antimo <[email protected]> writes:

Donald Knuth has been documenting and investigating programming
techniques forever in his monumental set called ``The Art of Computer Programming''. I suppose he must have in his own terms what is now
called continuations. In which part section of which book is the Scheme call/cc primitive studied?

I think the closest would be volume 1, section 1.4.2 on coroutines.

Regards,
Stefan
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From Newsgroup: comp.programming

On Tue, 22 Sep 2026 20:01:18 +0200, Stefan Große Pawig wrote:

Anton Antimo <[email protected]> writes:

In which part section of which book is the Scheme call/cc primitive
studied?

I think the closest would be volume 1, section 1.4.2 on coroutines.

Note that (stackful) coroutines are just one of the higher-level
constructs that can be implemented with a continuation primitive.

Continuations are somewhat more general than that.
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From Newsgroup: comp.programming

[email protected] (Stefan Große Pawig) writes:

Anton Antimo <[email protected]> writes:

Donald Knuth has been documenting and investigating programming
techniques forever in his monumental set called ``The Art of Computer
Programming''. I suppose he must have in his own terms what is now
called continuations. In which part section of which book is the Scheme
call/cc primitive studied?

I think the closest would be volume 1, section 1.4.2 on coroutines.

Thank you and all other posters in this thread.

So I think call/cc is essentially a jump over there, do something and
take here an address for you to get back to what you were doing before.

As usual, not much magic behinds the scenes, but surely the implications
of a jump instruction as far fetching, of which call/cc is a great illustration.
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From Newsgroup: comp.programming

On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:54 -0300, Anton Antimo wrote:

So I think call/cc is essentially a jump over there, do something
and take here an address for you to get back to what you were doing
before.

There doesn’t need to be a jump to begin with. You could just save the
return point and continue execution normally. Think setjmp/longjmp in
C -- that’s a form of continuation, too.

It’s just that the Lisps usually implement it as “call a function
while passing it another function which, when called, jumps back to
just after the point of the initial call”.
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From Newsgroup: comp.programming

Lawrence D’Oliveiro <[email protected]d> writes:

On Thu, 24 Sep 2026 13:59:54 -0300, Anton Antimo wrote:

So I think call/cc is essentially a jump over there, do something
and take here an address for you to get back to what you were doing
before.

There doesn’t need to be a jump to begin with. You could just save the return point and continue execution normally. Think setjmp/longjmp in
C -- that’s a form of continuation, too.

That could be seen as a jump-to-right-over-here?
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