You have seen, especially in the Higher Order Function lecture, how we can use functions
to generalize an operation. Continuations are another example of this. Many languages have a
return
keyword to tell the program to return from a function call with a certain result. What
if you could replace that with a parameter of your own choosing? The result is called a
continuation, and they have enormous power over the execution flow of a program.
These may well seem abstract to you, but you will recognize them if you ever program in languages like Javascript, where they are usually called “callbacks”.