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Comment by psykotic | Hacker News Reader

The Architecture of Symbolic Computers was not known to me and looks very interesting. Unfortunately, it's long out of print and the price for used copies on AbeBooks is high. If anyone has a copy in the Seattle area they'd like to donate for the general good of hackerdom, I have a paper guillotine and an industrial sheet-feed scanner at work. I've used them before to digitize parts of my personal library. If not, I might at some point buy a used copy.

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I see there are used copies listed at Amazon. Sellers with thousands of ratings generally have bots that set the book prices. For obscure, out-of-print books, the volume of buyers is really low. I've heard cough that if you want to acquire one of these books less expensively, that the best plan of action is to also try and sell a copy (which of course you don't have). Certain automated bots will then try to under-bid you in order to keep the coveted lowest price slot. You keep reducing the price until it meets you budget. Remove your listing, and then buy from the lowest priced source. The downside is if perchance someone were to try and purchase your non-existant copy. You'd have to cancel that order. But since there is no transaction, the buyer can't give you negative feedback. Of course Amazon doesn't like you canceling orders, so they'll cancel you account if you have a cancellation rate greater than 5%. Its fun watching the different algorithms compete and thinking about what you'd do in those situations (or so I've heard). Of course this strategy probably works better if the book isn't the subject of massive coverage just before you want to buy.

Come on, it's not like you're trying to track down the original Italian edition of some rare art book or something.

The book is maybe $65 because of a random price spike, it was $30 not that long ago, it'll be under $40 again soon. I bet most of you have paid two digits more than that for Apple hardware recently. It's not rare and collectible, it's just a really solid book on virtual machine design that has regrettably gone out of print.

If you're going to engage in such shady shenanigans, at least save it for something actually rare/pricey.

It's a brilliant book, a professor at my university used it for teaching SECD machine implementation. I'm glad that I could get it from the library. If you're interested in these kind of things, Henderson's "Functional Programming -- Application and Implementation" might also your thing. (IIRC the list did not contain it.)

The original lambda papers might be on your want-to-read list, too: http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html; I liked the AIM-453 TR, "The Art of the Interpreter, or, The Modularity Complex" by G. Steele and G. Sussman.

Thanks, I know about Henderson's book and all the lambda papers--I've read or at least skimmed pretty much everything there is to read on Lisp, which is why I was surprised not to have come across The Architecture of Symbolic Computers.

According to camelcamelcamel.com, its price spiked recently. It was more like $30-35 for a while (including when I bought my copy).

It is really good, describing several different architectures for computation. Different designs for virtual machines, if you will. It isn't limited to Lisp, either -- Prolog and a couple other language families are covered.

[PM'd you; I have a copy I can surrender for rendering :) ]

does that mean the results will be shared? not sure if this is legal, but i would be interested in the final pdf (or whatever)... andrew@acooke.org - thanks. (i am getting upvotes, so others too...)

I would be interested too ... should be worth a look. Thanks! raju.gandhi at google's service

If we're all asking, I might as well add maac.iin.saam@gmail.com... with a "please".

I should add my name to this: stephenjbarr at gmail dot com

I would love to get a (digital) copy :) famoreira@gmail.com

Can I get the pdf too, please? lisp@kirubakaran.com

along with the others, please jshizzle123@gmail.com

would greatly appreciate a copy mxhaack@gmail.com

love a look as well: jhl805@gmail.com

I have a copy and I don't find it that very useful.

Care to elaborate?

I'm about to build myself a small lisp related library, starting with the Art of the MOP and LiSP, so I'd love to know more about the books in this list.

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