Practical Foundations For Programming Languages

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

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.

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.

This book is about the basis of mathematical reasoning both in pure mathematics itself (particularly algebra and topology) and in computer science (how and what it means to prove correctness of programs). It contains original material and original developments of standard material, so it is also for professional researchers, but as it deliberately transcends disciplinary boundaries and challenges many established attitudes to the foundations of mathematics, the reader is expected to be open minded about these things.

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

Behavioral Types in Programming Languages provides the reader with the first comprehensive overview of the state of the art on this topic. Each section covers a particular programming paradigm or methodology, providing an ideal reference on the topic and identifying the areas as yet unexplored.

Typical undergraduate CS/CE majors have a practical orientation: they study computing because they like programming and are good at it. This book has strong appeal to this core student group. There is more than enough material for a semester-long course. The challenge for a course in programming language concepts is to help practical ......