

Lazy Partial Evaluation - edw519
http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2009/05/04/lazy-partial-evaluation/

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shaunxcode
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
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.)

