Programming Language Structures

from the "In their initial contact with computer programming, many students have been exposed to only one programming language. This book is designed to take such students further into thesubject of programming by emphasizing the structures of programming languages. The book introduces the reader to five important programming languages, Algol, Fortran, Lisp, Snobol, and Pascal, and develops an appreciation of fundamental similarities and ifferences among these languages. A unifying framework is constructed that can be used to study the structure of other languages, such as Cobol, PL/I, and APL. The book also has other objectives. For instance, it illustrates several of the tools and methodologies needed to construct large programs. Because similar interpreter structures and methods of data structuring and accessing are used to model not only programming languages but also computers, the book indirectly prepares the student to study computer organization. Working programmers whose everyday jobs confine them to a single language can use this book for self-study and gain a better perspective on the tools they now use."