They’re called so because of the way they are implemented (in general). Quoted from Direct Implementation of Shift and Reset in the MinCaml Compiler By interpreting a program using the continuation semantics, we can regard the state of the program as a continuation stack. Then, reset can be thought of as marking the continuation stack, … Read more
What is a prompt, conceptually? Scheme in general has the idea of continuations, but Racket extends this with the idea of delimited continuations. The idea of a continuation is that it captures the remaining computation left to be evaluated. I will not attempt to explain continuations in general, since that is outside the scope of … Read more
(This is not yet an answer, but only some clues came up in my mind. I hope this will lead to the real answer, by myself or by someone else.) Call-by-Value is Dual to Call-by-Name — Philip Wadler In the above paper the author introduced the “Dual Calculus”, a typed calculus that is corresponding to … Read more
My blog does explain what reset and shift do, so you may want to read that again. Another good source, which I also point in my blog, is the Wikipedia entry on continuation passing style. That one is, by far, the most clear on the subject, though it does not use Scala syntax, and the … Read more