The Anatomy of Programming Languages
Alice E. Fischer, Frances S. Grodzinsky · Digital Commons - New Heaven (University of New Haven) · 1993
The specific goals of this book are to help students learn: *To reason clearly about programming languages. *To develop principles of communication so that we can evaluate the wisdom and utility of the decisions made in the process of language design. *To break down language into its major components, and each component in to small pieces so that we can focus on competing alternatives. *To define a consistent and general set of terms for the components out of which programming languages are built, and the concepts on which they are based. * To use these terms to describe existing languages, and in so doing clarify the conflicting terminology used by the language designers, and untangle the complexities inherent in so many languages. *To see below the surface appearance of a language to its actual structure and descriptive power. *To understand that many language features that commonly occur together are, in fact, independent and separable. *To appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of each feature. *To suggest ways in which these basic building blocks can be recombined in new languages with more desirable properties and fewer faults. *To see the similarities and differences that exist among languages students already know, and to learn new ones. To use the understanding so gained to suggest future trends in language design.