Book excerpts:

This book gives a practical approach to understanding implementations of non-strict functional languages using lazy graph reduction. The book is intended to be a source of practical labwork material, to help make functional-language implementations 'come alive', by helping the reader to develop, modify and experiment with some non-trivial compilers.

The principal content of the book is a series of implementations of a small functional language called the Core language. The Core language is designed to be as small as possible, so that it is easy to implement, but still rich enough to allow modern non-strict functional languages to be translated into it without losing efficiency.