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
- Large Language Models can run tools in your terminal with LLM 0.26 - 27th May 2025
- Highlights from the Claude 4 system prompt - 25th May 2025
- Live blog: Claude 4 launch at Code with Claude - 22nd May 2025