Building Interpreters by Composing Monads

Abstract

We exhibit a set of functions coded in Haskell that can be used as building blocks to construct a variety of interpreters for Lisp-like languages. The building blocks are joined merely through functional composition. Each building block contributes code to support a specific feature, such as numbers, continuations, functions calls, or nondeterminism. The result of composing some number of building blocks is a parser, an interpreter, and a printer that support exactly the expression forms and data types needed for the combined set of features, and no more.