Semantics with applications

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…nching off the links that fadmmatt posted above, I found a booklist ( http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-gr... ) with a PDF of Nielson & Nielson's Semantics with Applications ( http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bra8130/Wiley_book/wiley.pdf ). That looks good, too. It sounds like I'm used to reading operational semantics, but have usually seen them specified in S-Expressions (as mini-interpreters in Scheme).

…Lisp implementation bibliography pretty much runs through PL research like a vein. Some of the stuff you must read for Lisp are typically in "books"; Christian Quinnec's Lisp in Small Pieces is the most important work, but you will need a good foundation in denotational semantics (you can get by with the one chapter in the little book by Nielson and Nielson, "Semantics with Applications: A Formal Introduction". Somewhere in there you will brush against various compilation methods and IRs for the lambda calculus, most importantly continuation passing style. Most semantics text introduce lambda calculus and its three rules, but none go in depth into this like the tall green book by Andrew Appel, "Compiling with Continuations", a good chunk of which can be read in Appel's other papers. Appel's work is MLish in nature, but don't let that stop…

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;…