Werner Kluge - Böcker

The book addresses ways and means of organizing computations, highlighting the relationship between algorithms and the basic mechanisms and runtime structures necessary to execute them using machines. It completely abstracts from concrete programming languages and machine architectures, taking instead the lambda calculus as the basic programming and program execution model to design various abstract machines for its correct implementation.The emphasis is on fully normalizing machines based on a full-fledged beta-reduction as an essential prerequisite for symbolic computations that treat functions and variables truly as first-class objects. Their weakly normalizing counterparts are shown to be functional abstract machines that sacrifice the flavors of full beta-reductions for decidedly simpler runtime structures and improved runtime efficiency. Further downgrading of the lambda calculus leads to classical imperative (von Neumann) machines that permit side-effecting operations on the runtime environment.

This book contains the strictly refereed post-workshop proceedings originating from the 8th International Workshop on the Implementation of Functional Languages, held in Bad Godesberg, Germany, in September 1996.The 15 thoroughly revised full papers presented were selected after a second round of reviewing from the 26 contributions accepted for presentation at the workshop. Also included is an overview by the volume editor. The volume addresses various implementational issues of functional languages including parallel implementations, language concepts and design, type systems, interpretation and compilation techniques, automatic program generation, concurrent processing, machine architectures, runtime profiling and application programming.