HPL: Little Languages and Tools. This item is unavailable.HPL: Little Languages and Tools

Leaders in the field of little languages and tools programming provide insightful information about the particular language that they helped to create, including Perl, Python, SQL, AWK, Tcl/Tk, and more. (Advanced).

In the third volume of the Handbook of Programming Languages series--Little Languages and Tools--editor Peter H. Salus presents several domain-specific programming languages and tools that are critical to getting certain jobs done in real-world applications. Though it is not by any means a comprehensive survey of such "little" languages, this volume covers many of the important ones.

The book starts with a discussion of Pic--a special-purpose language used to generate line drawings and that was used to create all of the diagrams in this volume. Next, there is a chapter on the EQN language for typesetting mathematical formulas. The volume continues with chapters on domain-specific languages in general and Unix formatting languages.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover the awk and sed Unix utilities. A lengthy discussion of SQL and Tcl/Tk follows. The volume also covers Perl and Python--an amazingly useful freeware object-oriented scripting language.

To round off this eclectic selection of languages, volume 3 finishes with coverage of several simple music-oriented languages such as MIDI, MUTRAN, and DDM. Even seasoned programmers are likely to be introduced to new languages in this volume.--Stephen Plain