Re: book

[Simon Cozens <address@hidden>]

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 11:45:38AM -0500, Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:
> Actually, what you don't seem to know is that several books of this
> form already exist,and some are classics. 

Not in the appropriate amount of depth.

> In particular, the modern
> version of Kamin's book is a standard text at numerous universities.
> It's called "The Essentials of Programming Languages" (Friedman, Wand
> and Haynes, MIT Press), is driven entirely by interpreters, and uses
> Scheme instead of Pascal.  See http://www.schemers.org/ for info.

I've got this, and it's OK. The treatment of continuations and tail
recursion is very useful and it'll tell you how to write a parser for a
toy language, and turn a parse tree into a Scheme expression. It doesn't
tell you how to do memory management, garbage collection, object
despatch, OS-independent IO, exception handling, signal handling, stack
management, translatable bytecode output, object finalization,
just-in-time compilation, op despatch, active data, C extensions,
embedability, complex data type storage, scoping, or regular
expressions. 

But apart from that, it tells you everything you need to implement
a modern interpreter.

-- 
"A few hours later, I'm on the administrative floor, and a secretary asks me 
about some mail I sent that had [scrambled double-byte characters] in it. 
While I do use a Japanese-patched Mutt at work, I've never had any instance of 
it sending scrambled characters, so I went over to her machine to take a look: 
[...] it was my sendmail.cf" - Jonathan Byrne.