Principles of Programming Languages: Design, Evaluation, and Implementation

Design is an essential topic for all computer science students regardless of whether or not they will ever have to create a programming language. The user who understands the motivation for various language facilities will be able to use them more intelligently; the compiler writer to implement them more reasonably. Implementation is also important since the language designer must be aware of the costs of the facilites provided. This text treats the design and implementation of programming languages as fundamental skills that all computer scientists should possess. It illustrates concepts with representative languages from five generations of language development. Design and implentation issues surrounding Fortran, Algol-60, Pascal, Ada, Lisp, SmallTalk, and Prolog are all covered in-depth as case studies to illustrate larger themes. The techniques discussed in this text are seminal; they form the basis of techniques that will continue to be useful and that can be varied to achieve a wider range of goals.