Programming Language Concepts

This book uses a functional programming language (F#) as a metalanguage to present all concepts and examples, and thus has an operational flavour, enabling practical experiments and exercises. It includes basic concepts such as abstract syntax, interpretation, stack machines, compilation, type checking, garbage collection, and real machine code. Also included are more advanced topics on polymorphic types, type inference using unification, co- and contravariant types, continuations, and backwards code generation with on-the-fly peephole optimization. 

Programming Language Concepts covers practical construction of lexers and parsers, but not regular expressions, automata and grammars, which are well covered already.  It discusses the design and technology of Java and C# to strengthen students’ understanding of these widely used languages.

Peter Sestoft is professor and head of department at the IT University of Copenhagen. He has 25 years teaching experience and his research interests include functional and object-oriented programming languages, the implementation of such languages, and parallel programming on multicore machines. He is the author or co-author of six books published by MIT Press, Morgan Kaufmann, Prentice-Hall and Springer.