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FW: book



> From: Matthias Felleisen [mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu]
> Subject: Re: book
> Hi Greg -- do you know of Friedman and Wand's "Essentials of Programming
> Languages"? Its manuscript predates Kamin's book by five years, and it is
> still around. It's written in Scheme, but it teaches you everything,
> including the basics of lexing and parsing (at the end, appropriately) 
> to build a fast abstract machine for your favorite language. I don't think
> anything is missing from the book for that purpose. Indeed, if you read it
> and can think of anything, let me know! 

Hi, Matthias; thanks for your mail.  Yes, I have a copy of Friedman and
Wand, and learned a lot from it.  However, it doesn't cover a lot of the
issues that modern VHLLs have to deal with, such as:

- strategies for encoding type information (see for example David Gudeman's
  ftp://ftp.cs.arizona.edu/reports/1993/TR93-27.ps)

- modern garbage collection techniques

- interfacing with legacy software (esp. binding to C)

and so on.  Also, I think that a book that compared and contrasted several
different languages' solutions to these problems, rather than concentrating
on a single language, would reach a much wider audience.

Thanks,
Greg


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