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Wow, I love reading stuff like this and realizing there is elegance yet to be discovered for a young "bipolar lisp programmer" such as myself. Humbling and insp

Wow, I love reading stuff like this and realizing there is elegance yet to be discovered for a young "bipolar lisp programmer" such as myself. Humbling and inspiring. It's like lisp with warts, but very tasty and powerful warts.

mahmud 17y ago
For the lambda calculus and the combinatory logic see Hindley and Seldin's "Lambda Calculus and Combinators", published this year, I think. Hindley and Selding have been doing LC since goodness knows when, and you will see their names all over papers and texts. The book I have in mind is very recent and has orange dark red/orange cover. For partial evaluation get "Partial Evaluation and Automatic Program Generation." Jones, Gomard and Sestoft. Freely available online somewhere. If you wanna dip into semantics, there is no better text than Nielson and Nielson "Semantics with Applications", also online on the authors' website. The undergraduate "appetizer" edition is new and I can't vouch for it, but the older one is a gem of a tiny little book. This text introduces all major three semantic theories (axiomatic, operational and denotational; the last one is the one you will brush against the most when you're studying lambda calculus. If you find yourself study Category theory you have gone too far. Operational semantics, specially small-step OS will make you a better virtual machine designer, imo; axiomatic semantics .. just predicate logic, nothing sophisticated, might introduce you to Communicating Sequential Processes if you wanna reason about parallel programs, but generally it's used mostly in 80s algol texts where half-page functions are analyzed to death and reasoned about.) (there was a great repo of Free programming languages and compiler books but it got shutdown over a year ago after the owner left the university -- if someone is interested in reviving the project, I have a directory listing they can pick and choose texts from.)

mahmud 17y ago

For the lambda calculus and the combinatory logic see Hindley and Seldin's "Lambda Calculus and Combinators", published this year, I think. Hindley and Selding have been doing LC since goodness knows when, and you will see their names all over papers and texts. The book I have in mind is very recent and has orange dark red/orange cover. For partial evaluation get "Partial Evaluation and Automatic Program Generation." Jones, Gomard and Sestoft. Freely available online somewhere. If you wanna dip into semantics, there is no better text than Nielson and Nielson "Semantics with Applications", also online on the authors' website. The undergraduate "appetizer" edition is new and I can't vouch for it, but the older one is a gem of a tiny little book. This text introduces all major three semantic theories (axiomatic, operational and denotational; the last one is the one you will brush against the most when you're studying lambda calculus. If you find yourself study Category theory you have gone too far. Operational semantics, specially small-step OS will make you a better virtual machine designer, imo; axiomatic semantics .. just predicate logic, nothing sophisticated, might introduce you to Communicating Sequential Processes if you wanna reason about parallel programs, but generally it's used mostly in 80s algol texts where half-page functions are analyzed to death and reasoned about.) (there was a great repo of Free programming languages and compiler books but it got shutdown over a year ago after the owner left the university -- if someone is interested in reviving the project, I have a directory listing they can pick and choose texts from.)