On the PLT list, the original poster asked about dynamic, static scope and closures. Shriram replied that:
My favorite reference for these kinds of questions is Andrew Appel’s Compiling with Continuations. If you ignore the slightly intimidating title, just about every question along these lines is answered – by the author of the Standard ML compiler. It is, I believe, a vast improvement over its successor, the Tiger book.
The book has been mentioned a few time before. It seems to be available here.
(via PLT)
Even though CwC is a bit tough sometimes (I don’t fancy the fonts that make formulas hard to read), it’s indeed a great book about compilation, let aside continuations.
Dan Sugalski had a great series of posts re: what various programming language constructs are, from an implementation level. He wrote these while he was the lead of the Parrot VM project. They are available at http://www.sidhe.org/~dan/blog/archives/cat_what_the_heck_is.html
I found them very useful to understanding things as I was learning Scheme.
Thanks Adrien and Jay.