A restricted form of continuation that captures only a portion of the execution context up to a specific delimiter or boundary, rather than the entire remaining computation. This provides more controlled and composable control flow operations.
Developed in the 1990s as a refinement of call/cc by researchers like Olivier Danvy and Andrzej Filinski. 'Delimited' comes from Latin 'delimitare' meaning to fix boundaries, emphasizing that these continuations have explicit scope limits unlike traditional continuations that capture everything.
Delimited continuations are like having a bookmark that only remembers part of your reading session - from where you are up to a specific chapter ending, not the entire rest of the book! This makes them much safer and more predictable than full continuations, which is why they're used in modern effect systems and async/await implementations.
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