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HOME >> ZEICHICK'S TAKE

Zeichick's Take: Recommended read: 'Design Concepts in Programming Languages'

By Alan Zeichick

August 28, 2008 — MIT Press' massive new tome is excellently researched, thorough and a must-have for your deskside bookcase. Just make sure the shelf is sturdy enough for its 1,322 pages: This is not a book to carry in your hand luggage for your next plane trip.

"Design Concepts in Programming Languages," by Franklyn Turbak and David Gifford, with Mark Sheldon, is designed to teach you how to design programming languages and implement their functions. Unlike many other books that I've seen, it emphasizes simplicity in both language design and language implementation.

The book begins by covering foundational issues of language design: syntax, operational semantics, denotational semantics and fixed points. The discussion of recursive definitions is well written, and there's a cheerful playfulness about the book that's a breath of fresh air in such a serious work.

The second section of the book dives into dynamic semantics, covering such areas as call-by-name vs. call-by-value, state vs. stateless, and data structures.

The third section, static semantics, goes into data types, polymorphism, type reconstruction, abstract types and modules, and it discusses how they affect program behavior.

The book concludes by digging into pragmatics, covering such minor details as compilation, garbage collection and meta-languages.

If you're working on your back-to-school reading list, by the way, here are some of my other book reviews, and also last year's holiday book list from SD Times, bringing together recommendations from experts like Larry O'Brien, Peter Coffee, Jeff Duntemann, Scott Barber, Tony Wasserman, Lori MacVittie, Robin Goldsmith, Andrew Binstock, Andy Hunt and David Intersimone.

Alan Zeichick is editorial director of SD Times. Read his blog at ztrek.blogspot.com.

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