Lambda the Ultimate

This article is making the rounds on the intarwebs.

"There appears to be broad agreement on the programming errors," says SANS Director, Mason Brown, "Now it is time to fix them. First we need to make sure every programmer knows how to write code that is free of the Top 25 errors, and then we need to make sure every programming team has processes in place to find, fix, or avoid these problems and has the tools needed to verify their code is as free of these errors as automated tools can verify."

I'm interested in increasing my understanding of some of the more advanced programming language constructs I see discussed here and in other places. Specifically the ones that are common in functional programming (first class everything, continuations, closures, etc.). Now the best way to understand them is to actually use them in a language that implements them. But that requires a good investment in learning those languages (Haskell, Lisp, etc).

What I'm looking for are some papers that describe the various advanced topics in terms that a regular C programmer, like myself, can understand. In other words, pretend that you are extending the C language -- how would the syntax look like for the various constructs?

Here's an example explanation for first class functions:
In C, you can take the name of a function, and pass it as a parameter to another function, like what is used in the standard library qsort(). You can also assign those function names to variables and array elements (which is useful for creating state machines). However, you have to create those functions somewhere else in the program. This can make it difficult to read the code and figure out what is going on. In the case of qsort(), which requires (among other things) a pointer to a comparison function, that function is probably only used once. So it would make sense to define the function right there where it is used. This would require first class anonymous functions. If C supported this, this, then the syntax would probably look like this:

qsort (my_array, 25, sizeof(*char), lambda(const void *p1, const void *p2) { return strcmp(*(char * const *) p1, *(char * const *) p2); });

In this example, the keyword "lambda" creates a function on the fly, and returns the address of that function as it's value. You can also use the expression:
x = lambda(int arg1, int arg2) { /* contents of function */ };
And you can now call the function via: "x(arg1, arg2);".

So, if C added the "lambda" keyword with the semantics given above, then it would have full first class anonymous functions.

...

As you can see, I think I've got an understanding of first class functions. What I'd like to see are write ups similar to the above explaining other concepts such as closures, continuations, monads, or anything else that could be expressed in an imperative language such as C. Or, if anything doesn't fit in that context, an explanation of that also.

A couple of postings that I've found that come close are Joe Spolsky's article "Can your programming language do this?" (which gives examples in Javascript), and the paper "Functional programming for the rest of us" on defmacro.org.

In case you are wondering why I'm looking for this, first of all I kind of understand some of the concepts, but would like to further cement my understanding. And secondly, I'd like something I can send to other people I know that are primarily C (or similar language) programmers (since I don't understand the concepts enough to explain them). Also, I'd like to extend the language I'm developing to support as much as is relevant (yes, I know, why write another language -- I'm doing it mostly for my own education, and possibly to use as a resource for others to learn from).

Thanks.