Mitchell J.C. Concepts in Programming Languages

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 530 p.Programming languages provide the abstractions, organizing principles, and control structures that programmers use to write good programs. This book is about the concepts that appear in programming languages, issues that arise in their implementation, and the way that language design affects program development. The text is divided into four parts:
Functions and Foundations
Procedures, Types, Memory Management, and Control
Modularity, Abstraction, and Object-Oriented Programming
Concurrency and Logic Programming
Part 1 contains a short study of Lisp as a worked example of programming language analysis and covers compiler structure, parsing, lambda calculus, and denotational semantics. A short Computability chapter provides information about the limits of compile-time program analysis and optimization.
Part 2 uses procedural Algol family languages and ML to study types, memory management, and control structures.
In Part 3 we look at program organization using abstract data types, modules, and objects. Because object-oriented programming is the most prominent paradigm in current practice, several different object-oriented languages are compared. Separate chapters explore and compare Simula, Smalltalk, C++, and Java.
Part 4 contains chapters on language mechanisms for concurrency and on logic programming.
The book is intended for upper-level undergraduate students and beginning graduate students with some knowledge of basic programming. Students are expected to have some knowledge of C or some other procedural language and some acquaintance with C++ or some form of object-oriented language. Some experience with Lisp, Scheme, or ML is helpful in Parts 1 and 2, although many students have successfully completed the course based on this book without this background. It is also helpful if students have some experience with simple analysis of algorithms and data structures. For example, in comparing implementations of certain constructs, it will be useful to distinguish between algorithms of constant-, polynomial-, and exponential-time complexity.
After reading this book, students will have a better understanding of the range of programming languages that have been used over the past 40 years, a better understanding of the issues and trade-offs that arise in programming language design, and a better appreciation of the advantages and pitfalls of the programming languages they use. Because different languages present different programming concepts, students will be able to improve their programming by importing ideas from other languages into the programs they write.