The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages

  • Simon Peyton Jones

Published by Prentice Hall Internaltional (UK) Ltd. | April 1987

Chapters also by: Philip Wadler, Programming Research Group, Oxford; Peter Hancock, Metier Management Systems, Ltd.; David Turner, University of Kent, Canterbury

“The Implementation of Functional Languages” is a book about implementing functional programming languages using lazy graph reduction, and it divides into three parts. The first part describes how to translate a high-level functional language into an intermediate language, called the lambda calculus, incuding detailed coverage of pattern-matching and type-checking. The second part begins with a simple implementation of the lambda calculus, based on graph reduction, and then develops a number of refinements and alternatives. The third part describes the G-machine, a sophisticated implementation of graph reduction, which provides a dramatic increase in performance over the implementations described earlier.