Theory and Implementation of a Functional Programming Language

The goal of this research is to design and implement a small functional programming language that incorporates some of the features that arise from the theoretical study of programming language semantics. We begin with the study of the lambda-calculus, an idealized mathematical language. We present the language PPL, a strongly typed, call-by-name language which supports recursion and polymorphism. We describe a compiler of PPL into a low-level assembly language. The compilation is based on an abstract machine interpretation and includes a type inference algorithm