On Jun 2, 2012, at 10:32 AM, curtis wolterding wrote:

> A friend and I recently finished working through this book together, The 
> Elements of Computing Systems -http://www1.idc.ac.il/tecs/, where we built a 
> computer (virtually) from the ground up: from NAND gates, to a (barely) 
> working compiler and a very basic OS. 


Sorry for an off-topic reply, but this sentence reminded me of Dijkstra's quote 
that the name "computer science" applied to astronomy would translate as 
"telescope science" and biologists should probably be called "microscope 
scientists". Otherwise I will say that you deserve a badge of honor for 
completing the above. 

HtDP's full philosophy is the exact opposite. Introduce the systematic design 
of software as the primary idea of our discipline and the derivation of a 
machine, including assembler and friends, as the other constraint-inducing end 
of it. These last few lectures are a part of the original course, including the 
machine and the loader-linker-assembler, but they didn't make it into the book. 

For the basics of constructing a Racket interpreter, PLAI is the best starting 
point. It is inspired by Essentials of Programming Languages (Friedman and 
Wand). To understand the actual implementation, however, you will need to check 
out material about (jit) compilers once you're through those. The list will 
help you

-- Matthias


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