A new edition of a textbook that provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages, completely revised, with significant new material. This book provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. Most of these essentials relate to the semantics, or meaning, of program elements, and the text uses interpreters (short programs that directly analyze an abstract representation of the program text) to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and executable. The approach is both analytical and hands-on. The book provides views of programming languages using widely varying levels of abstraction, maintaining a clear connection between the high-level and low-level views. Exercises are a vital part of the text and are scattered throughout; the text explains the key concepts, and the exercises explore alternative designs and other issues. The complete Scheme code for all the interpreters and analyzers in the book can be found online through The MIT Press web site. For this new edition, each chapter has been revised and many new exercises have been added. Significant additions have been made to the text, including completely new chapters on modules and continuation-passing style. Essentials of Programming Languages can be used for both graduate and undergraduate courses, and for continuing education courses for programmers.

A comprehensive introduction to type systems and programming languages. A type system is a syntactic method for automatically checking the absence of certain erroneous behaviors by classifying program phrases according to the kinds of values they compute. The study of type systems—and of programming languages from a type-theoretic perspective—has important applications in software engineering, language design, high-performance compilers, and security. This text provides a comprehensive introduction both to type systems in computer science and to the basic theory of programming languages. The approach is pragmatic and operational; each new concept is motivated by programming examples and the more theoretical sections are driven by the needs of implementations. Each chapter is accompanied by numerous exercises and solutions, as well as a running implementation, available via the Web. Dependencies between chapters are explicitly identified, allowing readers to choose a variety of paths through the material. The core topics include the untyped lambda-calculus, simple type systems, type reconstruction, universal and existential polymorphism, subtyping, bounded quantification, recursive types, kinds, and type operators. Extended case studies develop a variety of approaches to modeling the features of object-oriented languages.

The classic guide to how computers work, updated with new chapters and interactive graphics "For me, Code was a revelation. It was the first book about programming that spoke to me. It started with a story, and it built up, layer by layer, analogy by analogy, until I understood not just the Code, but the System. Code is a book that is as much about Systems Thinking and abstractions as it is about code and programming. Code teaches us how many unseen layers there are between the computer systems that we as users look at every day and the magical silicon rocks that we infused with lightning and taught to think." - Scott Hanselman, Partner Program Director, Microsoft, and host of Hanselminutes Computers are everywhere, most obviously in our laptops and smartphones, but also our cars, televisions, microwave ovens, alarm clocks, robot vacuum cleaners, and other smart appliances. Have you ever wondered what goes on inside these devices to make our lives easier but occasionally more infuriating? For more than 20 years, readers have delighted in Charles Petzold's illuminating story of the secret inner life of computers, and now he has revised it for this new age of computing. Cleverly illustrated and easy to understand, this is the book that cracks the mystery. You'll discover what flashlights, black cats, seesaws, and the ride of Paul Revere can teach you about computing, and how human ingenuity and our compulsion to communicate have shaped every electronic device we use. This new expanded edition explores more deeply the bit-by-bit and gate-by-gate construction of the heart of every smart device, the central processing unit that combines the simplest of basic operations to perform the most complex of feats. Petzold's companion website, CodeHiddenLanguage.com, uses animated graphics of key circuits in the book to make computers even easier to comprehend. In addition to substantially revised and updated content, new chapters include: Chapter 18: Let's Build a Clock! Chapter 21: The Arithmetic Logic Unit Chapter 22: Registers and Busses Chapter 23: CPU Control Signals Chapter 24: Jumps, Loops, and Calls Chapter 28: The World Brain From the simple ticking of clocks to the worldwide hum of the internet, Code reveals the essence of the digital revolution.

A thorough and accessible introduction to a range of key ideas in type systems for programming language. The study of type systems for programming languages now touches many areas of computer science, from language design and implementation to software engineering, network security, databases, and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. This book offers accessible introductions to key ideas in the field, with contributions by experts on each topic. The topics covered include precise type analyses, which extend simple type systems to give them a better grip on the run time behavior of systems; type systems for low-level languages; applications of types to reasoning about computer programs; type theory as a framework for the design of sophisticated module systems; and advanced techniques in ML-style type inference. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages builds on Benjamin Pierce's Types and Programming Languages (MIT Press, 2002); most of the chapters should be accessible to readers familiar with basic notations and techniques of operational semantics and type systems—the material covered in the first half of the earlier book. Advanced Topics in Types and Programming Languages can be used in the classroom and as a resource for professionals. Most chapters include exercises, ranging in difficulty from quick comprehension checks to challenging extensions, many with solutions.

1. Introduction 2. Syntax 3. Operational semantics 4. Denotational semantics 5. Fixed points 6. FL: a functional language 7. Naming 8. State 9. Control 10. Data 11. Simple types 12. Polymorphism and higher-order types 13. Type reconstruction 14. Abstract types 15. Modules 16. Effects describe progran behavior 17. Compilation 18. Garbage collection.

History of Programming Languages presents information pertinent to the technical aspects of the language design and creation. This book provides an understanding of the processes of language design as related to the environment in which languages are developed and the knowledge base available to the originators. Organized into 14 sections encompassing 77 chapters, this book begins with an overview of the programming techniques to use to help the system produce efficient programs. This text then discusses how to use parentheses to help the system identify identical subexpressions within an expression and thereby eliminate their duplicate calculation. Other chapters consider FORTRAN programming techniques needed to produce optimum object programs. This book discusses as well the developments leading to ALGOL 60. The final chapter presents the biography of Adin D. Falkoff. This book is a valuable resource for graduate students, practitioners, historians, statisticians, mathematicians, programmers, as well as computer scientists and specialists.