William D Clinger  <will@ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
+---------------
| > BTW, are there any documents/books/sources on the implementation (and
| > compilation) of scheme?
| 
| For the kinds of things that you are talking about, I think the best
| reference is Christian Queinnec's book "Lisp in Small Pieces"
+---------------

*Absolutely!*  Tough going in places, but essential for anyone who might
be considering doing an implementation. Two areas I found especially
helpful were:

1. His discussion of the various "levels" or "worlds" [I forget exactly
   the term he used] of macro interpretation/expansion; and

2. A section on some nasty/subtle interactions between CALL/CC and EVAL,
   especially how the fact that a continuation can be captured during
   argument evaluation requires that arguments *must* be evaluated
   into temporary storage then *copied* to the new bindings for the
   arguments for the procedure being called (rather than immediately
   copied into the newly-bound locations as each argument is evaluated).
   [Unless you can prove through data/control flow analysis that
   no continuation can be captured during the argument evaluation.]


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-855		rpw3@sgi.com
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