Programming Language Pragmatics

The innovative approach of the first edition of Programming Language Pragmatics provided students with an integrated view of programming language design and implementation, while offering a solid teaching text on timely language topics in a rigorous yet accessible style.

The new edition carries on these distinctive features as well as the signature tradition of illustrating the most recent developments in programming language design with a variety of modern programming languages.

• Addresses the most recent developments in programming language design, including C99, C#, and Java 5
• Introduces and discusses scripting languages throughout the book as well as in an entire new chapter
• Includes a comprehensive chapter on concurrency, with coverage of the new Java concurrency package (JSR 166) and the comparable mechanisms in C#
• Updates many sections and topics, including iterators, exceptions, polymorphism, templates/generics, scope rules and declaration ordering, separate compilation, garbage collection, and threads and synchronization
• Highlights the interaction and tradeoffs inherent in language design and language implementation decisions with over 100 "Design and Implementation" call-out boxes
• Adds end-of-chapter "Exploration" exercises―open-ended, research-type activities
• Provides review questions after sections for quick self-assessment
• Includes over 800 numbered examples to help the reader quickly cross-reference and access content

Michael L. Scott is a professor and past Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Rochester. He is best known for work on synchronization and concurrent data structures: algorithms from his group appear in a wide variety of commercial and open-source systems. A Fellow of the ACM and the IEEE, he shared the 2006 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing. In 2001 he received the University's Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Distinguished Achievement and Artistry in Undergraduate Teaching.