Exploring Programming Language Architecture in Perl

This book presents an informal and friendly introduction to some of the core ideas in modern computer science, using the programming language Perl as its vehicle.

The book takes the form of a series of working interpreters for the language PScheme, which is a variant of Scheme. Each version of the interpreter builds upon the previous one, until by the end of the book the PScheme language is quite fully functional and has some interesting surprises.

Specifically, the book and the interpreters therein demonstrate:

primitive arithmetic operations;
conditional evaluation;
local variables;
functions and closure;
recursion;
list processing;
a simple macro facility;
variable assignment and side-effects;
procedures (as opposed to functions) and sequences;
objects and classes;
continuations;
threads;
exceptions;
non-determinism and chronological backtracking;
logic programming.