Principles of Functional Programming

The book is designed as an intermediate undergraduate text. Not recommend as an introductory text on functional programming. Rather, its concentration on implementation techniques and comparisons of language features makes it more suitable for a second course for students who have already learned to program using a functional style.
The language used for examples is SUGAR, a syntactically sugared variant of the Lambda-calculus, but another functional language such as SASL, KRC, or HOPE could be used for the lab portion of the course. The first chapter briefly contrasts functional and imperative programming and discusses functional decomposition. Chapter 2 introduces SUGAR. The next part of the book, consisting of Chapters 3 through 6, covers a wide variety of topics classified as “Mathematical Foundations and Implementation.” These topics include the Lambda-calculus, parameter evaluation strategies, the SECD machine, combinator reduction, data-flow machines, and denotational semantics. The final two chapters show how other functional languages (the functional subset of LISP, HOPE, KRC, and FP) differ from SUGAR.