I want to start by being absolutely positively clear about two things, because our usability research has shown this to be confusing. Remember our little program from last time? async void ArchiveDocuments(List<Url> urls) { Task archive = null;...

The designers of C# 2.0 realized that writing iterator logic was painful. So they added iterator blocks. That way the compiler could figure out how to build a state machine that could store the continuation - the “what comes next” - in state somewhere...

Today is when things are going to get really long and confusing. But we'll make it through somehow. Consider the following task: you’ve got a list of URLs. You want to fetch the document associated with each URL. (Let’s suppose for the sake of argument...

The obvious question at this point is: if CPS is so awesome then why don’t we use it all the time? Why have most professional developers never heard of it, or, those who have, think of it as something only those crazy Scheme programmers do? First of all...

Last time I sketched briefly how one might implement interesting control flows like try-catch using continuations; as we saw, the actual implementations of Try and Throw are trivial once you have CPS. I'm sure that you could extend that work to implement...

Last time on Fabulous Adventures: “ But we can construct arbitrarily complex control flows by keeping track of multiple continuations and deciding which one gets to go next. ” Let’s look at an example of something more complex than a conditional. Consider...

Good morning fabulous readers, let me just start by saying that this is going to get really long and really complicated but it will all pay off in the end. I’m also going to be posting on an accelerated schedule, more than my usual two posts per week...

No technology today, just an amusing story from a couple summers ago. Leah and I rent out a room in our house; I find it quite pleasant to live with a friend who pays my mortgage for me. One day a couple summers back our housemate K had her parents...

Here's another myth about value types that I sometimes hear: "Obviously, using the new operator on a reference type allocates memory on the heap. But a value type is called a value type because it stores its own value, not a reference to its value. Therefore...

As i was saying last time, the nice thing about "no backtracking" is that it makes the language much easier to understand. Simple rules benefit both the compiler and the code reader; both are attempting to read the code to make sense of it. It is not...

A number of the articles I’ve published over the years involve “backtracking” algorithms; most recently my series on how to solve Sudoku puzzles (and more generally, all graph colouring problems) by backtracking. The idea of a backtracking algorithm is...