Exceptionally comprehensive in approach, this book explores the major issues in both design and implementation of modern programming languages and provides a basic introduction to the underlying theoretical models on which these languages are based. The emphasis throughout is on fundamental concepts—readers learn important ideas, not minor language differences--but several languages are highlighted in sufficient detail to enable readers to write programs that demonstrate the relationship between a source program and its execution behavior--e.g., C, C++, JAVA, ML, LISP, Prolog, Smalltalk, Postscript, HTML, PERL, FORTRAN, Ada, COBOL, BASIC SNOBOL4, PL/I, Pascal. Begins with a background review of programming languages and the underlying hardware that will execute the given program; then covers the underlying grammatical model for programming languages and their compilers (elementary data types, data structures and encapsulation, inheritance, statements, procedure invocation, storage management, distributed processing, and network programming). Includes an advanced chapter on language semantics--program verification, denotational semantics, and the lambda calculus. For computer engineers and others interested in programming language designs.

Product Description: This book provides an introduction to modern methods of developing and analyzing computer programs. Focusing on bringing fundamental concepts and principles from computer science and software engineering into the first programming course, the text provides a foundation on which to build modern software engineering practices in later courses, and prepares students for future work in computer science or other fields...read more