Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

June 27, 2011

Implementation of Functional Programming
Languages – Graph Reduction

Filed under: Functional Programming,Graphs — Patrick Durusau @ 6:33 pm

The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages by Simon L Peyton-Jones. (1987)

From the Preface:

This book is about implementing functional programming languages using graph reduction.

There appear to be two main approaches to the efficient implementation of functional languages. The first is an environment-based scheme, exemplified by Cardelli’s ML implementation, which derives from the experience of the Lisp community. The other is graph reduction, a much newer technique first invented by Wadsworth [Wadsworth, 1971], and on which the Ponder and Lazy ML implementations are founded. Despite the radical differences in beginnings, the most sophisticated examples from each approach show remarkable similarities.

This book is intended to have two main applications:

(i) As a course text for part of an undergraduate or postgraduate course on the implementation of functional languages.

(ii) As a handbook for those attempting to write a functional language implementation based on graph reduction.

You may also enjoy:

Implementing functional languages: a tutorial by Simon Peyton-Jones and David Lester. (1992)

You may be thinking that 1971 is a bit old for a newer technique (it’s not) but in that case you need to look at the homepage of Simon Peyton-Jones. Current work includes Parallel Haskell, Haskell in the Cloud, etc. Be prepared to get lost for some time.

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