Abstract Computing Machines. A Lambda Calculus Perspectives

Texts published in this series are intended mostly for the graduate level. Typically, an undergraduate background in computer science will be assumed. However, the background required varies from topic to topic, and some books are self-contained.The texts cover both modern and classical areas with an innovative approach that may give them additional value as monographs. Most books in this series have examples and exercises.

This book takes a a-calculus approach to organizing computations. It sets out with a brief introduction to ?-calculus, describes a variant of the classical SECSD-machine as a basic interpreter for the ?-calculus, and in the main part continues with fully normalizing abstract ?-calculus machines, of which some are interpreting and some execute compiled code.The classical functional abstract machines are introduced as their weakly normalizing counterparts, and abstract machines for classical imperative languages are shown to derive from them by admitting side-effecting operations.