[Haskell-cafe] Exploring Programming Language Theory

[Stephen Tetley]

If you want compiling functional languages and can relax the
requirement for "up to date":

Antoni Diller's "Compiling Functional Languages" is good. It is short
enough (<300 pages) that you could reasonably work through it and it
includes the full source of a compiler in the appendix - written in
Pascal so translating it to something else is a sufficient exercise.
It is long out of print, but copies turn up on Amazon - I got it from
Amazon UK for a couple of pounds.

Also Franklyn Turbak and David Gifford's "Design Concepts for
Programming Languages" is very good (and new!) but huge. It is not
quite exhaustive - as a skim reader I wanted the specification /
translation rules for a particular compile step and frustratingly it
was left as an exercise. Otherwise it is a very good presentation - it
uses translation rules (ala the LaTeX Semantic package) rather than
source code throughout, so once you are used to the style it is both
very concise (and precise) and unlikely to go out of date any time
soon.