Programming languages provide the abstractions, organizing principles, and control structures that programmers use to write good programs. This book is about the concepts that appear in programming languages, issues that arise in their implementation, and the way that language design affects program development. The text is divided into four parts:

• Part 1: Functions and Foundations

• Part 2: Procedures, Types, Memory Management, and Control

• Part 3: Modularity, Abstraction, and Object-Oriented Programming

• Part 4: Concurrency and Logic Programming

Part 1 contains a short study of Lisp as a worked example of programming language analysis and covers compiler structure, parsing, lambda calculus, and denotational semantics. A short Computability chapter provides information about the limits of compile-time program analysis and optimization.

Part 2 uses procedural Algol family languages and ML to study types, memory management, and control structures.

In Part 3 we look at program organization using abstract data types, modules, and objects. Because object-oriented programming is the most prominent paradigm in current practice, several different object-oriented languages are compared. Separate chapters explore and compare Simula, Smalltalk, C++, and Java.

Part 4 contains chapters on language mechanisms for concurrency and on logic programming.

The book is intended for upper-level undergraduate students and beginning graduate students with some knowledge of basic programming.