Editing Continuation (section)

==History==
The earliest description of continuations was made by [[Adriaan van Wijngaarden]] in September 1964. Wijngaarden spoke at the IFIP Working Conference on Formal Language Description Languages held in Baden bei Wien, Austria. As part of a formulation for an [[Algol 60]] preprocessor, he called for a transformation of proper procedures into [[continuation-passing style]],<ref name="history_of_continuations">{{harvnb|Reynolds|1993}}</ref> though he did not use this name, and his intention was to simplify a program and thus make its result more clear.

[[Christopher Strachey]], [[Christopher P. Wadsworth]] and [[John C. Reynolds]] brought the term ''continuation'' into prominence in their work in the field of [[denotational semantics]] that makes extensive use of continuations to allow sequential programs to be analysed in terms of [[functional programming]] semantics.<ref name="history_of_continuations"/>

[[Steve Russell (computer scientist)|Steve Russell]]<ref>[http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/node3.html S.R. Russell noticed that ''eval'' could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.] —John McCarthy, ''History of LISP''</ref> invented the continuation in his second [[Lisp (programming language)|Lisp]] implementation for the [[IBM 704]], though he did not name it.<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.computernostalgia.net/articles/steveRussell.htm | title = Steve "Slug" Russell | work = Computer History}}</ref>

{{harvtxt|Reynolds|1993}} gives a complete history of the discovery of continuations.