Combinator Reductions on a Lisp Machine
Nilgun Mat
Committee:
Masters Thesis(Dec 1969)
Keywords:

A number of techniques exist for implementing applicative languages. One of the techniques, based on Combinatory Logic, implements applicative languages as combinator reductions. This thesis describes an implementation on the Symbolics 3600 Lisp machine of normal order reductions with either copied or shared values for a subset of SASL using Turner's combinator technique. These two implementations are compared with respect to the time and memory requirements of reductions. Also, the efficiency of reductions with and without the optimisation rules are investigated. Finally, the user is provided with the option of displaying the underlying structure and the transformations on copied and shared reductions.