I’m a noob in this land (PL theory), it’s really not my domain, but I’m interested in learning more on my free time… I was wondering: Is “The revised report on the syntactic theories of sequential control and state, Felleisen and Hieb, 1992” considered a landmark paper? It seems highly cited (256 citations) at least.

In any case, this > With the new calculi, equational reasoning about imperative programs becomes as simple as reasoning about functional programs. is just wow

Yes, that’s certainly an influential paper. I’m not great at keeping up with which paper was the start of which idea, but that one is certainly in the mix of key papers that coalesced into reduction semantics.

(One reason that I’m not great at keeping up with the original papers is that they’re usually not the best way to learn the concepts. Textbooks that come along later usually offer a clearer and more complete picture. In this case, that paper fed into Matthias’s dissertation, and then his monograph, and then the Redex book.)

Thanks. The book isn’t free, so I was looking at the Redex tutorial on the website, but it has a lot of ambiguities and is unfinished in places

Maybe I should buy the book then

I recommend buying the book, it’s a good introduction.

@mflatt What’s the name of the monograph?

Matthias’s monograph is “Programming Languages and Lambda Calculi”. I later revised it for my class and added a second part on types — but Benjamin Pierce’s book is better for types, and that part didn’t go into the Redex book.

Awesome, thanks!