Gilles Dowek

Jean-Jacques Lévy

The design and implementation of programming languages, from Fortran and Cobol to Caml and Java, has been one of the key developments in the management of ever more complex computerized systems. Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages gives the reader the means to discover the tools to think, design, and implement these languages. It proposes a unified vision of the different formalisms that permit definition of a programming language: small steps operational semantics, big steps operational semantics, and denotational semantics, emphasising that all seek to define a relation between three objects: a program, an input value, and an output value. These formalisms are illustrated by presenting the semantics of some typical features of programming languages: functions, recursivity, assignments, records, objects, ... showing that the study of programming languages does not consist of studying languages one after another, but is organized around the features that are present in these various languages. The study of these features leads to the development of evaluators, interpreters and compilers, and also type inference algorithms, for small languages.

Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages

John C. Mitchell

Ernst W. Mayr

In recent years, IT application scenarios have evolved in very innovative ways. Highly distributed networks have now become a common platform for large-scale distributed programming, high bandwidth communications are inexpensive and widespread, and most of our work tools are equipped with processors enabling us to perform a multitude of tasks. In addition, mobile computing (referring specifically to wireless devices and, more broadly, to dynamically configured systems) has made it possible to exploit interaction in novel ways. To harness the flexibility and power of these rapidly evolving, interactive systems, there is need of radically new foundational ideas and principles; there is need to develop the theoretical foundations required to design these systems and to cope with the many complex issues involved in their construction; and there is need to develop effective principles for building and analyzing such systems. Reflecting the diverse and wide spectrum of topics and interests within the theoretical computer science community, Exploring New Frontiers of Theoretical Informatics, is presented in two distinct but interrelated tracks: -Algorithms, Complexity and Models of Computation, -Logic, Semantics, Specification and Verification. Exploring New Frontiers of Theoretical Informatics contains 46 original and significant contributions addressing these foundational questions, as well as 4 papers by outstanding invited speakers. These papers were presented at the 3rd IFIP International Conference on Theoretical Computer Science (TCS 2004), which was held in conjunction with the 18th World Computer Congress in Toulouse, France in August 2004 and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).

Jean-Jacques Lévy

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