This book unifies a broad range of programming language concepts under the framework of type systems and structural operational semantics.

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.

Programming Language Foundations is a concise text that covers a wide range of topics in the mathematical semantics of programming languages, for readers without prior advanced background in programming languages theory. The goal of the book is to provide rigorous but accessible coverage of essential topics in the theory of programming languages. Stump’s Programming Language Foundations is intended primarily for a graduate-level course in programming languages theory which is standard in graduate-level CS curricula. It may also be used in undergraduate programming theory courses but ONLY where students have a strong mathematical preparation.

A comprehensive undergraduate textbook covering both theory and practical design issues, with an emphasis on object-oriented languages.

This book is about the basis of mathematical reasoning both in pure mathematics itself (particularly algebra and topology) and in computer science (how and what it means to prove correctness of programs). It contains original material and original developments of standard material, so it is also for professional researchers, but as it deliberately transcends disciplinary boundaries and challenges many established attitudes to the foundations of mathematics, the reader is expected to be open minded about these things.

A presentation of the formal underpinnings of object-oriented programming languages.

This clearly written textbook introduces the reader to the three styles of programming, examining object-oriented/imperative, functional, and logic programming. The focus of the text moves from highly prescriptive languages to very descriptive languages, demonstrating the many and varied ways in which we can think about programming. Designed for interactive learning both inside and outside of the classroom, each programming paradigm is highlighted through the implementation of a non-trivial programming language, demonstrating when each language may be appropriate for a given problem. Features: includes review questions and solved practice exercises, with supplementary code and support files available from an associated website; provides the foundations for understanding how the syntax of a language is formally defined by a grammar; examines assembly language programming using CoCo; introduces C++, Standard ML, and Prolog; describes the development of a type inference system for the language Small.