Closures and continuations
3rd April 2003
Thanks to Dan Sugalski (designer of Parrot, the next generation Perl VM) I finally understand what continuations and closures actually are. He explains them as part of a comparison between the forthcoming Parrot and two popular virtual machines already in existence:
- (Perl|python|Ruby) on (.NET|JVM) leads in to the explanation.
- The reason for Parrot, part 2 explains closures.
- Continuations and VMs explains continuations.
- Continuations and VMs, part 2 rounds things off by explaining why the JVM and the CLR are unsuitable environments for supporting these language features.
More recent articles
- Video: Building a tool to copy-paste share terminal sessions using Claude Code for web - 23rd October 2025
- Dane Stuckey (OpenAI CISO) on prompt injection risks for ChatGPT Atlas - 22nd October 2025
- Living dangerously with Claude - 22nd October 2025