Comment by jcl

18 years ago

We used Appel's book in college, and it wasn't too bad (in the hands of decent professor, of course). Appel glosses over some subjects, but you really have to if you want to implement the base compiler in a single semester and still maybe have time to implement some of the more interesting features in the second half of the book.

About half our class didn't finish the base compiler. Fortunately for us, we were using the Java version of the text, so most of the students already knew the implementation language; I know a course at another school using the ML text, and none of them finished their compiler, because they had to learn the language at the same time as coding the compiler.

Here's an online book that covers interpretation of programming languages in Scheme (touching on functional language compilation in several places):