: We introduce a unified framework to describe, relate, compare and classify functional language implementations. The compilation process is expressed as a succession of program transformations in the common framework. At each step, different transformations model fundamental choices. A benefit of this approach is to structure and decompose the implementation process. The correctness proofs can be tackled independently for each step and amount to proving program transformations in the functional world. This approach also paves the way to formal comparisons by making it possible to estimate the complexity of individual transformations or compositions of them. Our study aims at covering the whole known design space of sequential functional languages implementations. In particular, we consider call-by-value, call-by-name and call-by-need reduction strategies as well as environment and graph-based implementations. We describe for each compilation step the diverse alternatives as program tr...

Lisp has become the language of choice for many applications such as artificial intelligence programs or symbol manipulation. The original implementation of Lisp 1.5 was a concise, elegant statement of the semantics of the language. Although production Lisp systems have undergone significant development and evolution since Lisp 1.5, including the development of sophisticated compilers, there have been few significant theoretical improvements in the implementations of these systems. Most improvements, such as arrays or shallow-binding, have been made more for the sake of speed than for the sake of storage. A notable exception to this is the technique of tail recursion, which can save more than just stack space. We believe that more can be done to reduce the storage requirements of Lisp programs. Although in many instances, the Lisp programmer can reduce the storage requirements of his program by deleting unneeded pointers as soon as possible, there is nothing he can do about systematic ...