Representing control in the presence of one-shot continuations

Abstract

Traditional first-class continuation mechanisms allow a captured continuation to be invoked multiple times. Many continuations, however, are invoked only once. This paper introduces one-shot continuations, shows how they interact with traditional multi-shot continuations, and describes a stack-based implementation of control that handles both one-shot and multi-shot continuations. The implementation eliminates the copying overhead for one-shot continuations that is inherent in multi-shot continuations. © 1996 ACM.