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Language Design Documents

This page should provide links to documents discussing the design of various languages, including language standards when appropriate. I prefer links to documents from the original design process.

• Ada Steelman (The requirements doc which led to Ada)
• Ada 95 Language Study Notes
• Ada-83 Rationale
• Ada-95 Rationale
• A Personal View of APL - Kenneth E. Iverson
• C Standards Committee (JTC1/SC22/WG14)
• C++ Standards Committee Papers
• A History of CLU - Barbara Liskov
• Erlang Development
• The Haskell Report
• The Original Java Whitepaper
• LISP History according to McCarthy's memory in 1978
• The design and implementation of Mercury
• Modula-3 Language Definition
• Larry Wall on Perl 6: Apocalypse: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6.
• Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs)
• Engineering a Programming Language: The Type and Class System of Sather
• Design Principles Behind Smalltalk - Ingalls
• Squeak OOPSLA Paper (Back to the Future) - Smalltalk

More links are welcome!