book wish inspired by "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages"

On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 4:06 PM, Miguel Garcia wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> I was re-reading "The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages",
>  http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/simonpj/Papers/slpj-book-1987/
> and could not avoid comparing the situation with the Scala compilation
> phases.
>
> I have a hard time charting where the following boundaries lie:
>  (a) ascribing types
>  (b) bringing into canonical form
>  (c) optimizing
>
> My (somewhat uninformed) impression is that most phases after refchecks
> perform a mixture of (b) and (c).
> To have a more informed opinion, exploring the source of nsc is not fully
> satisfactory, as most of the time that reveals *for particular cases* how a
> transformation works. But the big picture is still missing.
>
> It would be interesting to read technical documentation (in the spirit of
> the book above) for Scala.
>
Yes, absolutely. That would be wonderful. The problem is finding
someone with both the time and the insight to do it.

Cheers