You could call it a continuation, I guess, but continuations don't generally persist between separate invocations of your programming. The image is a file that

You could call it a continuation, I guess, but continuations don't generally persist between separate invocations of your programming. The image is a file that can be passed around and when you open/execute (or whatever you want to call it), the program resumes where you left off. This is how most Lisp applications are distributed as well. Starting from a clean image (that is, one containing only the language standard library) you build up the initial state of your app by compiling the source files, and then dump the whole shebang as an image.