You should probably spend some time browsing through Lambda the Ultimate [1], a discussion forum devoted to this kind of thing (it is very academic though). Th

You should probably spend some time browsing through Lambda the Ultimate [1], a discussion forum devoted to this kind of thing (it is very academic though). There's a collectively authored set of guidelines "How to Design (Declarative) Programming Languages" [2] posted in comp.lang.lightweight, curated by Scott McKay that you might find useful. [1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org http://lambda-the-ultimate.org [2] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/2547/focus=2552 http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.lightweight/2547/foc...