The Anatomy of Programming Languages

This text is intended for a course in advanced programming languages or the structure of programming
language and should be appropriate for students at the junior, senior, or master's level.
It should help the student understand the principles that underlie all languages and all language
implementations.
This is a comprehensive text which attempts to dissect language and explain how a language
is really built. The first eleven chapters cover the core material: language specification, objects,
expressions, control, and types. The more concrete aspects of each topic are presented first, followed
by a discussion of implementation strategies and the related semantic issues. Later chapters
cover current topics, including modules, object-oriented programming, functional languages, and
concurrency constructs.
The emphasis throughout the text is on semantics and abstraction; the syntax and historical
development of languages are discussed in light of the underlying semantical concepts. Fundamental
principles of computation, communication, and good design are stated and are used to evaluate
various language constructs and to demonstrate that language designs are improving as these
principles become widely understood.
Examples are cited from many languages including Pascal, C, C++, FORTH, BASIC, LISP,
FORTRAN, Ada, COBOL, APL, Prolog, Turing, Miranda, and Haskell.