Essentials Of Programming Languages Third Edition

A new edition of a textbook that provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages, completely revised, with significant new material. This book provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. Most of these essentials relate to the semantics, or meaning, of program elements, and the text uses interpreters (short programs that directly analyze an abstract representation of the program text) to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and executable. The approach is both analytical and hands-on. The book provides views of programming languages using widely varying levels of abstraction, maintaining a clear connection between the high-level and low-level views. Exercises are a vital part of the text and are scattered throughout; the text explains the key concepts, and the exercises explore alternative designs and other issues. The complete Scheme code for all the interpreters and analyzers in the book can be found online through The MIT Press web site. For this new edition, each chapter has been revised and many new exercises have been added. Significant additions have been made to the text, including completely new chapters on modules and continuation-passing style. Essentials of Programming Languages can be used for both graduate and undergraduate courses, and for continuing education courses for programmers.

This textbook offers an understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. The text uses interpreters, written in Scheme, to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and directly executable.

A new edition of a textbook that provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages, completely revised, with significant new material. This book provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. Most of these essentials relate to the semantics, or meaning, of program elements, and the text uses interpreters (short programs that directly analyze an abstract representation of the program text) to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and executable. The approach is both analytical and hands-on. The book provides views of programming languages using widely varying levels of abstraction, maintaining a clear connection between the high-level and low-level views. Exercises are a vital part of the text and are scattered throughout; the text explains the key concepts, and the exercises explore alternative designs and other issues. The complete Scheme code for all the interpreters and analyzers in the book can be found online through The MIT Press web site. For this new edition, each chapter has been revised and many new exercises have been added. Significant additions have been made to the text, including completely new chapters on modules and continuation-passing style. Essentials of Programming Languages can be used for both graduate and undergraduate courses, and for continuing education courses for programmers.

"Friedman, Wand, and Haynes have done a landmark job... The sample interpreters in this book are outstanding models. Indeed, since they are runnable models, I'm sure that these interpreters will find themselves at the cores of many programming systems over the years." --from the foreword by Hal Abelson What really happens when a program runs? "Essentials of Programming Languages" teaches the fundamental concepts of programming languages through numerous short programs, or "interpreters, " that actually implement the features of a language. Nearly 300 exercises using these programs provide a hands-on understanding of programming principles that is hard, if not impossible, to achieve by formal study alone. In an approach that is uniquely suited to mastering a new level of programming structure, the authors derive a sequence of interpreters that begins with a high-level operational specification (close to formal semantics) and ends with what is effectively assembly language--a process involving programming transformation techniques that should be in the toolbox of every programmer. The first four chapters provide the foundation for an in-depth study of programming languages, including most of the features of Scheme, needed to run the language-processing programs of the book. The next four chapters form the core of the book, deriving a sequence of interpreters ranging from very high- to very low-level. The authors then explore variations in programming language semantics, including various parameter-passing techniques and object-oriented languages, and describe techniques for transforming interpreters that ultimately allow the interpreter to beimplemented in any low-level language. They conclude by discussing scanners and parsers and the derivation of a compiler and virtual machine from an interpreter. More on "Essentials of Programming Languages"

This clearly written textbook introduces the reader to the three styles of programming, examining object-oriented/imperative, functional, and logic programming. The focus of the text moves from highly prescriptive languages to very descriptive languages, demonstrating the many and varied ways in which we can think about programming. Designed for interactive learning both inside and outside of the classroom, each programming paradigm is highlighted through the implementation of a non-trivial programming language, demonstrating when each language may be appropriate for a given problem. Features: includes review questions and solved practice exercises, with supplementary code and support files available from an associated website; provides the foundations for understanding how the syntax of a language is formally defined by a grammar; examines assembly language programming using CoCo; introduces C++, Standard ML, and Prolog; describes the development of a type inference system for the language Small.

This excellent addition to the UTiCS series of undergraduate textbooks provides a detailed and up to date description of the main principles behind the design and implementation of modern programming languages. Rather than focusing on a specific language, the book identifies the most important principles shared by large classes of languages. To complete this general approach, detailed descriptions of the main programming paradigms, namely imperative, object-oriented, functional and logic are given, analysed in depth and compared. This provides the basis for a critical understanding of most of the programming languages. An historical viewpoint is also included, discussing the evolution of programming languages, and to provide a context for most of the constructs in use today. The book concludes with two chapters which introduce basic notions of syntax, semantics and computability, to provide a completely rounded picture of what constitutes a programming language. /div

Basic, no nonsense introduction to the programming language Scheme

Programming Language Pragmatics, Fourth Edition, is the most comprehensive programming language textbook available today. It is distinguished and acclaimed for its integrated treatment of language design and implementation, with an emphasis on the fundamental tradeoffs that continue to drive software development. The book provides readers with a solid foundation in the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of the full range of programming languages, from traditional languages like C to the latest in functional, scripting, and object-oriented programming. This fourth edition has been heavily revised throughout, with expanded coverage of type systems and functional programming, a unified treatment of polymorphism, highlights of the newest language standards, and examples featuring the ARM and x86 64-bit architectures. Updated coverage of the latest developments in programming language design, including C & C++11, Java 8, C# 5, Scala, Go, Swift, Python 3, and HTML 5 Updated treatment of functional programming, with extensive coverage of OCaml New chapters devoted to type systems and composite types Unified and updated treatment of polymorphism in all its forms New examples featuring the ARM and x86 64-bit architectures