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Truth is, the idea isn't difficult, it's just very difficult to explain well.

I would suggest that you learn some basic Scheme, download an interpreter, and just play around with it. Try a few things with call-with-current-continuation. Try to figure out the examples on Wikipedia. It'll might take a few hours of toying with it over a few days, but you'll get it. Don't be discouraged :)

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As I said elsewhere, that's not enough. I wrote a Scheme compiler in a class with Kent Dybvig way back in the stone age. I used Scheme in my AI classes in the same degree program.

What I need - and what I suspect will take a lot longer - is an actual situation where continuations solve some problem I've encountered. That's when I'll get them, but not earlier, in my experience.

The continuation based approach to web-servers could be interesting for you. And some parsing techniques get easier with continuations, too.

Yeah, the web-server continuation thing rings a bell; I should probably look that up again.

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