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Finding Landin's "The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions"

I've been continually surprised by both the amount and the quality of comp sci literature that can be obtained from the web. Other than text books, there have been only a few occasions when I've been unable to locate an article. However one such exception has been Landin's "The Mechancial Evaluation of Expressions". At this point it feels that every other article I read cites Landin's paper. I have all of his other major papers, but TMEE is the one that is mentioned as the most central. I've tried and failed numerous times. Most inexplicably the Oxford Journal website appears to have no notion that this paper exists. Can anyone help me.

By A B Carter at 2007-01-12 14:24 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 13744 reads

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All you need is a time series database of the Internet

I had the same problem a while back. Someone really needs to talk to OUP about that. (Their website doesn't make for easy feedback, though.)

But luckily, the Wayback Machine can help. Try here.

That's a search for the old OUP URLs, which I found via creative googling back when I ran into this. The results are scanned pages. Landin's paper is in 308.tif through 320.tif. IIRC, there was a page or two missing. You need a lot of memory to load the pages (they're 6720 x 8640 resolution).

By Anton van Straaten at Fri, 2007-01-12 16:23 | login or register to post comments

Awesome!

Many thanks, got everything but the 17th page.

By A B Carter at Fri, 2007-01-12 18:42 | login or register to post comments

Not satisfied

OK, this is killing me. I've read through the paper once and while there is a lot for me to digest, it's clear that the missing 17th page is critical. Almost the entirety of the SECD machine is defined on this page and much of the final two pages make reference to the page.

So is there anyone out there who can provide me with this single page?

By A B Carter at Thu, 2007-01-18 20:21 | login or register to post comments

I have MEE

When I saw this thread, I recalled seeing TIFF versions of The Computer Journal pages on-line, but I see that (1) this issue is no longer available in the Oxford University Press archive and (2) what is there is behind what seems to be a pay wall.

But I kept thinking I had a copy and indeed I do. It is a reprint of the full article, pages 308-320, and its only blemishes are having been 3-hole-punched, a little discoloration and slight wrinkles, and the fact that someone marked it with correction of some typos including in the definition of Transform(S, E, C, D) on p.317. This wasn't me. The annotations are those of Bill Burge or Peter Landin (possibly both), and I think Burge gave it to me in 1964.

I don't quite know what to do about this. I could scan it, with great effort, but I am not keen about distributing it or putting it on the web considering that Oxford University Press retains some sort of IP rights.

There is however, another printing (as I find by having a reprint of that too) as a chapter in a book, which makes minor corrections to MEE and adds some additional material. This is the Chapter 5, "A lambda-calculus approach" in Advances In Programming and Non-Numerical Computation, Pergamon (Oxford: 1966). I found 246 library holdings of this book in the OCLC WorldCat.

Hmm, my copy of that reprint has corrections in it too! Nothing serious.

By orcmid at Tue, 2008-01-22 21:44 | login or register to post comments

including page 317

http://ttic.uchicago.edu/~blume/classes/aut2008/proglang/papers/Landin-mech-eval.pdf

This paper has been difficult to find online, especially page 317.

By Marlene Miller at Sat, 2008-11-29 21:44 | login or register to post comments

I think this was not the

I think this was not the case fairly recently, but I found that with Carnegie Mellon's university access I can now access the entirety of the paper at http://comjnl.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/6/4/308

By Rob Simmons at Fri, 2009-07-24 14:58 | login or register to post comments