The mechanical evaluation of expressions
Details
Would you believe that one 13 page paper written in 1964 (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/crary/www/819-f09/Landin64.pdf) coined:
- syntactic sugar
- closures
- thunks
- partial evaluation
- de Bruijn Indices
- call by need
- strictness analysis
- domain specific languages
- applicative expressions
... and if that wasn't enough also invented a profoundly influential lambda calculus abstract machine called the SECD machine?
... and that's 13 pages including citations!
Join me as we dive into a paper (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs/user/crary/www/819-f09/Landin64.pdf) virtually unknown outside of academic circles that a beginner could read over a weekend and that changed the course of programming languages forever.