Programming Languages: Principles and Paradigms

Programming Languages: Principles and Paradigms gives a complete, hands-on treatment of principles that uses formal grammar, type system and denotational semantics along with presenting and contrasting the major programming paradigms. The book integrates its coverage of formal semantics into its coverage of major language design topics and programming paradigms with integrated coverage of formal semantics. This integration is, in part, accomplished through the use of a small imperative language, which the authors call "Jay."

Additionally, this book focuses on one language per paradigm (except for functional programming, where both Scheme and Haskell are used). This allows for a deeper understanding of the language paradigm, rather than a survey of all the languages that are part of it. This book also discusses two modern programming paradigms, event-driven programming and concurrent programming.