The Structure And Design Of Programming Languages

Introduction: background and technical foundations; User aspects; Elements of procedural programming languages.

The text is unique in its tutorial presentation of higher-order lambda calculus and intuitionistic type theory.

The Structure of Typed Programming Languages describes the fundamental syntactic and semantic features of modern programming languages, carefully spelling out their impacts on language design. Using classical and recent research from lambda calculus and type theory, it presents a rational reconstruction of the Algol-like imperative languages such as Pascal, Ada, and Modula-3, and the higher-order functional languages such as Scheme and ML.David Schmidt's text is based on the premise that although few programmers ever actually design a programming language, it is important for them to understand the structuring techniques. His use of these techniques in a reconstruction of existing programming languages and in the design of new ones allows programmers and would-be programmers to see why existing languages are structured the way they are and how new languages can be built using variations on standard themes.The text is unique in its tutorial presentation of higher-order lambda calculus and intuitionistic type theory. The latter in particular reveals that a programming language is a logic in which its typing system defines the propositions of the logic and its well-typed programs constitute the proofs of the propositions.The Structure of Typed Programming Languages is designed for use in a first or second course on principles of programming languages. It assumes a basic knowledge of programming languages and mathematics equivalent to a course based on books such as Friedman, Wand, and Haynes': Essentials of Programming Languages. As Schmidt covers both the syntax and the semantics of programming languages, his text provides a perfect precursor to a more formal presentation of programming language semantics such as Gunter's Semantics of Programming Languages.

1. Introduction 2. Syntax 3. Operational semantics 4. Denotational semantics 5. Fixed points 6. FL: a functional language 7. Naming 8. State 9. Control 10. Data 11. Simple types 12. Polymorphism and higher-order types 13. Type reconstruction 14. Abstract types 15. Modules 16. Effects describe progran behavior 17. Compilation 18. Garbage collection.

Explains the concepts underlying programming languages, and demonstrates how these concepts are synthesized in the major paradigms: imperative, OO, concurrent, functional, logic and with recent scripting languages. It gives greatest prominence to the OO paradigm. Includes numerous examples using C, Java and C++ as exmplar languages Additional case-study languages: Python, Haskell, Prolog and Ada Extensive end-of-chapter exercises with sample solutions on the companion Web site Deepens study by examining the motivation of programming languages not just their features

A completely revised edition, offering new design recipes for interactive programs and support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming. This introduction to programming places computer science at the core of a liberal arts education. Unlike other introductory books, it focuses on the program design process, presenting program design guidelines that show the reader how to analyze a problem statement, how to formulate concise goals, how to make up examples, how to develop an outline of the solution, how to finish the program, and how to test it. Because learning to design programs is about the study of principles and the acquisition of transferable skills, the text does not use an off-the-shelf industrial language but presents a tailor-made teaching language. For the same reason, it offers DrRacket, a programming environment for novices that supports playful, feedback-oriented learning. The environment grows with readers as they master the material in the book until it supports a full-fledged language for the whole spectrum of programming tasks. This second edition has been completely revised. While the book continues to teach a systematic approach to program design, the second edition introduces different design recipes for interactive programs with graphical interfaces and batch programs. It also enriches its design recipes for functions with numerous new hints. Finally, the teaching languages and their IDE now come with support for images as plain values, testing, event-driven programming, and even distributed programming.