Foundations Of Programming Languages

This text presents topics relating to the design and implementation of programming languages as fundamental skills that all computer scientists should possess. Rather than provide a feature-by-feature examination of programming languages, the author discusses programming languages organized by concepts.

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 book unifies a broad range of programming language concepts under the framework of type systems and structural operational semantics.

"Programming languages embody the pragmatics of designing software systems, and also the mathematical concepts which underlie them. Anyone who wants to know how, for example, object-oriented programming rests upon a firm foundation in logic should read this book. It guides one surefootedly through the rich variety of basic programming concepts developed over the past forty years." -- Robin Milner, Professor of Computer Science, The Computer Laboratory, Cambridge University "Programming languages need not be designed in an intellectual vacuum; John Mitchell's book provides an extensive analysis of the fundamental notions underlying programming constructs. A basic grasp of this material is essential for the understanding, comparative analysis, and design of programming languages." -- Luca Cardelli, Digital Equipment Corporation Written for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students, "Foundations for Programming Languages" uses a series of typed lambda calculi to study the axiomatic, operational, and denotational semantics of sequential programming languages. Later chapters are devoted to progressively more sophisticated type systems.

Stump’s Programming Language Foundations is a short concise text that covers semantics, equally weighting operational and denotational semantics for several different programming paradigms: imperative, concurrent, and functional. Programming Language Foundations provides: an even coverage of denotational, operational an axiomatic semantics; extensions to concurrent and non-deterministic versions; operational semantics for untyped lambda calculus; functional programming; type systems; and coverage of emerging topics and modern research directions.

A presentation of the formal underpinnings of object-oriented programming languages.

A comprehensive introduction to type systems and programming languages. A type system is a syntactic method for automatically checking the absence of certain erroneous behaviors by classifying program phrases according to the kinds of values they compute. The study of type systems—and of programming languages from a type-theoretic perspective—has important applications in software engineering, language design, high-performance compilers, and security. This text provides a comprehensive introduction both to type systems in computer science and to the basic theory of programming languages. The approach is pragmatic and operational; each new concept is motivated by programming examples and the more theoretical sections are driven by the needs of implementations. Each chapter is accompanied by numerous exercises and solutions, as well as a running implementation, available via the Web. Dependencies between chapters are explicitly identified, allowing readers to choose a variety of paths through the material. The core topics include the untyped lambda-calculus, simple type systems, type reconstruction, universal and existential polymorphism, subtyping, bounded quantification, recursive types, kinds, and type operators. Extended case studies develop a variety of approaches to modeling the features of object-oriented languages.

A comprehensive undergraduate textbook covering both theory and practical design issues, with an emphasis on object-oriented languages.