Compiling a functional language
Luca Cardelli · 1984
This paper summarizes my experience in implementing a compiler for a functional language. The language is ML(1) [Milner 84] and the compiler was first implemented in 1980 as a personal project when I was a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh(2). At the time, I was familiar with programming language semantics but knew very little about compiler technology; interpreters had been my main programming concern. Major influences in the design of this compiler have been [Steele 77] [Steele 78] and the implementation folklore for statically and dynamically scoped dialects of Lisp [Allen 78]. As a result, the internal structure of the compiler is fairly unorthodox, if compared for example with [Aho 78].