Re: Writing Compilers in Functional Languages

Neelakantan Krishnaswami <neelk@cs.cmu.edu> writes:


> Kkaa wrote:
> >
> > Are there any books or online resources that instead focus on using
> > functional languages as implementation languages? I'm considering
> > using Haskell or Scheme, but I'm hoping that the resources won't
> > assume a particular functional langauge.
>
> Try Andrew Appel's _Modern Compiler Implementation in ML_. It uses
> Standard ML, but translating to Haskell should be fairly straight
> forward.


I not sure about this. Appel's book uses updatable references in many
places, such as for name generation and hash tables. These are not
easily translated into Haskell. The same is true for exceptions.
Additionally, though SML and Haskell are both functional languages,
the "traditional" programming style for these is quite different - you
would tend to use type classes, list comprehensions and monads in
Haskell, and these are not found in SML. So translating a program
directly from SML to Haskell will not be trivial and the result will
be very atypical Haskell.


But I agree that if you understand Haskell and SML quite well, you
should be able to carry many of the functional techniques (such as
pattern matching and higher-order functions) over from SML to Haskell.


                Torben

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