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From: johnl@ima.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: Request comments on text.
Message-ID: <617@ima.ISC.COM>
Date: Wed, 15-Jul-87 20:44:04 EDT
Article-I.D.: ima.617
Posted: Wed Jul 15 20:44:04 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 18-Jul-87 04:25:56 EDT
References: <609@ima.ISC.COM>
Sender: johnl@ima.ISC.COM
Reply-To: harvard!seismo!utah-cs!shebs (Stanley Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
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In article <609@ima.ISC.COM> stevev@tekchips.tek.com (Steve Vegdahl) writes:
>[on dragon book weaknesses ...] These weaknesses can be largely summed up
>in the sentence "the dragon book teaches you how to write a C compiler for
>a traditional architecture".

Amen.  It is of course a mere coincidence that all the authors are associated
with Bell Labs... :-)  I would really like to see a text that covered
Lisp/Prolog/Smalltalk implementation in general, both runtime and compilation.
Alas, such a beast does not exist, although a hardworking instructor could
assemble papers and book chapters, and get decent coverage.  Peter Henderson's
book "Functional Programming: Application and Implementation" (Prentice-Hall,
1980) has some good material in the back, including an object file to boot
up your compiler with (!).  Allen's "Anatomy of Lisp" is well-known but
obscure in places, and the only material on optimization is recent conference
papers and source code.

>  * A good programming environment is becoming increasingly recognized
>    as a fundamental piece of a language implemenation.  The book does
>    not really address this subject.  Quite a bit of good work has
>    been done, for example, in the area of incremental compilation
>    (e.g., Reps).

Hoo boy, I might consider writing a text on straight language implementation
(if I ever finish my thesis :-( ), but environments are a deep dark morass.
It seems risky to include a lot of relatively undigested recent literature
in a text that needs to teach basic principles and stay relevant for a few
years.  Still, it's probably about time for someone to get started.  Is there
anybody out there writing a book on environment implementation?

							stan shebs
							shebs@cs.utah.edu
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