Design Concepts in Programming Languages


Book Description

Key ideas in programming language design and implementation explained using a simple and concise framework; a comprehensive introduction suitable for use as a textbook or a reference for researchers. Hundreds of programming languages are in use today—scripting languages for Internet commerce, user interface programming tools, spreadsheet macros, page format specification languages, and many others. Designing a programming language is a metaprogramming activity that bears certain similarities to programming in a regular language, with clarity and simplicity even more important than in ordinary programming. This comprehensive text uses a simple and concise framework to teach key ideas in programming language design and implementation. The book's unique approach is based on a family of syntactically simple pedagogical languages that allow students to explore programming language concepts systematically. It takes as premise and starting point the idea that when language behaviors become incredibly complex, the description of the behaviors must be incredibly simple. The book presents a set of tools (a mathematical metalanguage, abstract syntax, operational and denotational semantics) and uses it to explore a comprehensive set of programming language design dimensions, including dynamic semantics (naming, state, control, data), static semantics (types, type reconstruction, polymporphism, effects), and pragmatics (compilation, garbage collection). The many examples and exercises offer students opportunities to apply the foundational ideas explained in the text. Specialized topics and code that implements many of the algorithms and compilation methods in the book can be found on the book's Web site, along with such additional material as a section on concurrency and proofs of the theorems in the text. The book is suitable as a text for an introductory graduate or advanced undergraduate programming languages course; it can also serve as a reference for researchers and practitioners.




Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages


Book Description

A thorough and accessible introduction to a range of key ideas in type systems for programming language. The study of type systems for programming languages now touches many areas of computer science, from language design and implementation to software engineering, network security, databases, and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. This book offers accessible introductions to key ideas in the field, with contributions by experts on each topic. The topics covered include precise type analyses, which extend simple type systems to give them a better grip on the run time behavior of systems; type systems for low-level languages; applications of types to reasoning about computer programs; type theory as a framework for the design of sophisticated module systems; and advanced techniques in ML-style type inference. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages builds on Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages (MIT Press, 2002); most of the chapters should be accessible to readers familiar with basic notations and techniques of operational semantics and type systems—the material covered in the first half of the earlier book. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages can be used in the classroom and as a resource for professionals. Most chapters include exercises, ranging in difficulty from quick comprehension checks to challenging extensions, many with solutions.




Programming Language Design Concepts


Book Description

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




Types and Programming Languages


Book Description

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.




Concepts in Programming Languages


Book Description

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




Crafting Interpreters


Book Description

Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam. That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun. This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.




Programming Language Concepts


Book Description

This book uses a functional programming language (F#) as a metalanguage to present all concepts and examples, and thus has an operational flavour, enabling practical experiments and exercises. It includes basic concepts such as abstract syntax, interpretation, stack machines, compilation, type checking, garbage collection, and real machine code. Also included are more advanced topics on polymorphic types, type inference using unification, co- and contravariant types, continuations, and backwards code generation with on-the-fly peephole optimization. This second edition includes two new chapters. One describes compilation and type checking of a full functional language, tying together the previous chapters. The other describes how to compile a C subset to real (x86) hardware, as a smooth extension of the previously presented compilers.The examples present several interpreters and compilers for toy languages, including compilers for a small but usable subset of C, abstract machines, a garbage collector, and ML-style polymorphic type inference. Each chapter has exercises. Programming Language Concepts covers practical construction of lexers and parsers, but not regular expressions, automata and grammars, which are well covered already. It discusses the design and technology of Java and C# to strengthen students’ understanding of these widely used languages.




Essentials of Programming Languages


Book Description

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.




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