Compiling a Functional Language

Machine The Functional Abstract Machine (Fam) is a stack machine designed to support functional languages on large address space computers. It can be considered an SECD machine [Landin 64] which has been optimized to allow very fast function application and the use of true stacks (as opposed to linked lists). This section contains a brief overview of the Fam; which is fully described in [Cardelli 83]. The machine supports functional objects (closures, which are dynamically allocated and garbage collected). All the optimization and support techniques which make application slower are strictly avoided, while tail recursion and pattern-matching calls are supported. Restricted side effects and arrays are provided. The machine is intended to make compilation from ML and other functional languages easy and regular, by providing a rich set of operations and an open-ended collection of data types. The instructions of the machine are not supposed to be interpreted, but assembled into machine..