What's the difference between a Continuation (as in Smalltalk) and an interrupt (as in an Assembler)?

Question

I'm struggling to understand the concept of Continuations (as used in Seaside with Smalltalk). A snippet from Wikipedia says:

"... refer to first-class continuations, which are constructs that give a programming language the ability to save the execution state at any point and return to that point at a later point in the program..."

Isn't this simply another way of expressing what an assembler programmer would do when programming an interrupt? Or have I completely missed the point!

Answer 1

A continuation can be seen as a snapshot copy of the running process. Capturing a continuation means that the current process is copied and put aside. After that, code continues to execute normally. Evaluating a continuation means that the current process is terminated and the copied one is resumed in exactly the state it was captured. Continuations can typically be resumed multiple times.

An interrupt is more like a coroutine, where there are two different execution threads (application code, interrupt handler) that interleave each other.