For students of systems programming, this book provides a pragmatic and practically orientated course in programming language translation. Using standard Pascal throughout, students are encouraged to explore areas of language design and implementation through carefully integrated practical work. Complete case studies, suitable for use on small systems, serve as a foundation and provide a stimulating challenge in the many projects and exercises that are suggested.
A new edition of a textbook that provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages, completely revised, with significant new material. This book provides students with a deep, working understanding of the essential concepts of programming languages. Most of these essentials relate to the semantics, or meaning, of program elements, and the text uses interpreters (short programs that directly analyze an abstract representation of the program text) to express the semantics of many essential language elements in a way that is both clear and executable. The approach is both analytical and hands-on. The book provides views of programming languages using widely varying levels of abstraction, maintaining a clear connection between the high-level and low-level views. Exercises are a vital part of the text and are scattered throughout; the text explains the key concepts, and the exercises explore alternative designs and other issues. The complete Scheme code for all the interpreters and analyzers in the book can be found online through The MIT Press web site. For this new edition, each chapter has been revised and many new exercises have been added. Significant additions have been made to the text, including completely new chapters on modules and continuation-passing style. Essentials of Programming Languages can be used for both graduate and undergraduate courses, and for continuing education courses for programmers.
Despite using them every day, most software engineers know little about how programming languages are designed and implemented. For many, their only experience with that corner of computer science was a terrifying "compilers" class that they suffered through in undergrad and tried to blot from their memory as soon as they had scribbled their last NFA to DFA conversion on the final exam. That fearsome reputation belies a field that is rich with useful techniques and not so difficult as some of its practitioners might have you believe. A better understanding of how programming languages are built will make you a stronger software engineer and teach you concepts and data structures you'll use the rest of your coding days. You might even have fun. This book teaches you everything you need to know to implement a full-featured, efficient scripting language. You'll learn both high-level concepts around parsing and semantics and gritty details like bytecode representation and garbage collection. Your brain will light up with new ideas, and your hands will get dirty and calloused. Starting from main(), you will build a language that features rich syntax, dynamic typing, garbage collection, lexical scope, first-class functions, closures, classes, and inheritance. All packed into a few thousand lines of clean, fast code that you thoroughly understand because you wrote each one yourself.
An Essential Reference for Intermediate and Advanced R Programmers Advanced R presents useful tools and techniques for attacking many types of R programming problems, helping you avoid mistakes and dead ends. With more than ten years of experience programming in R, the author illustrates the elegance, beauty, and flexibility at the heart of R. The book develops the necessary skills to produce quality code that can be used in a variety of circumstances. You will learn: The fundamentals of R, including standard data types and functions Functional programming as a useful framework for solving wide classes of problems The positives and negatives of metaprogramming How to write fast, memory-efficient code This book not only helps current R users become R programmers but also shows existing programmers what’s special about R. Intermediate R programmers can dive deeper into R and learn new strategies for solving diverse problems while programmers from other languages can learn the details of R and understand why R works the way it does.
This book provides a gently paced introduction to techniques for implementing programming languages by means of compilers and interpreters, using the object-oriented programming language Java. The book aims to exemplify good software engineering principles at the same time as explaining the specific techniques needed to build compilers and interpreters.
This comprehensive handbook, written by leading experts in the field, details the groundbreaking research conducted under the breakthrough GALE program--The Global Autonomous Language Exploitation within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), while placing it in the context of previous research in the fields of natural language and signal processing, artificial intelligence and machine translation. The most fundamental contrast between GALE and its predecessor programs was its holistic integration of previously separate or sequential processes. In earlier language research programs, each of the individual processes was performed separately and sequentially: speech recognition, language recognition, transcription, translation, and content summarization. The GALE program employed a distinctly new approach by executing these processes simultaneously. Speech and language recognition algorithms now aid translation and transcription processes and vice versa. This combination of previously distinct processes has produced significant research and performance breakthroughs and has fundamentally changed the natural language processing and machine translation fields. This comprehensive handbook provides an exhaustive exploration into these latest technologies in natural language, speech and signal processing, and machine translation, providing researchers, practitioners and students with an authoritative reference on the topic.
The official book on the Rust programming language, written by the Rust development team at the Mozilla Foundation, fully updated for Rust 2018. The Rust Programming Language is the official book on Rust: an open source systems programming language that helps you write faster, more reliable software. Rust offers control over low-level details (such as memory usage) in combination with high-level ergonomics, eliminating the hassle traditionally associated with low-level languages. The authors of The Rust Programming Language, members of the Rust Core Team, share their knowledge and experience to show you how to take full advantage of Rust's features--from installation to creating robust and scalable programs. You'll begin with basics like creating functions, choosing data types, and binding variables and then move on to more advanced concepts, such as: Ownership and borrowing, lifetimes, and traits Using Rust's memory safety guarantees to build fast, safe programs Testing, error handling, and effective refactoring Generics, smart pointers, multithreading, trait objects, and advanced pattern matching Using Cargo, Rust's built-in package manager, to build, test, and document your code and manage dependencies How best to use Rust's advanced compiler with compiler-led programming techniques You'll find plenty of code examples throughout the book, as well as three chapters dedicated to building complete projects to test your learning: a number guessing game, a Rust implementation of a command line tool, and a multithreaded server. New to this edition: An extended section on Rust macros, an expanded chapter on modules, and appendixes on Rust development tools and editions.
THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES MCQ (MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS) SERVES AS A VALUABLE RESOURCE FOR INDIVIDUALS AIMING TO DEEPEN THEIR UNDERSTANDING OF VARIOUS COMPETITIVE EXAMS, CLASS TESTS, QUIZ COMPETITIONS, AND SIMILAR ASSESSMENTS. WITH ITS EXTENSIVE COLLECTION OF MCQS, THIS BOOK EMPOWERS YOU TO ASSESS YOUR GRASP OF THE SUBJECT MATTER AND YOUR PROFICIENCY LEVEL. BY ENGAGING WITH THESE MULTIPLE-CHOICE QUESTIONS, YOU CAN IMPROVE YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE SUBJECT, IDENTIFY AREAS FOR IMPROVEMENT, AND LAY A SOLID FOUNDATION. DIVE INTO THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES MCQ TO EXPAND YOUR PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES KNOWLEDGE AND EXCEL IN QUIZ COMPETITIONS, ACADEMIC STUDIES, OR PROFESSIONAL ENDEAVORS. THE ANSWERS TO THE QUESTIONS ARE PROVIDED AT THE END OF EACH PAGE, MAKING IT EASY FOR PARTICIPANTS TO VERIFY THEIR ANSWERS AND PREPARE EFFECTIVELY.
A single line of code offers a way to understand the cultural context of computing. This book takes a single line of code—the extremely concise BASIC program for the Commodore 64 inscribed in the title—and uses it as a lens through which to consider the phenomenon of creative computing and the way computer programs exist in culture. The authors of this collaboratively written book treat code not as merely functional but as a text—in the case of 10 PRINT, a text that appeared in many different printed sources—that yields a story about its making, its purpose, its assumptions, and more. They consider randomness and regularity in computing and art, the maze in culture, the popular BASIC programming language, and the highly influential Commodore 64 computer.
At the dawn of the computer age, an elite development team at IBM built the most influential computer programming language in history: FORTRAN. Abstracting Away the Machine tells the epic story of how they did it--and what happened next. Over the past six decades, programming languages like ALGOL, BASIC, C/C++, COBOL, Java, LISP, LOGO, Pascal, PL/I, Python, Visual Basic, and many others opened up the field of computer science, and of computer programming in general, to the masses. But all of these high-level languages (HLLs)--computer languages that automate, hide, or otherwise abstract away the underlying operations of the machine--owe a huge debt of gratitude to FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation), the first HLL to achieve widespread adoption. Many programming practices that we take for granted now came about as a result of FORTRAN. Created over a three-year period at IBM by a development team led by a brilliant but wayward mathematician named John W. Backus, FORTRAN was implemented initially on the IBM 704 mainframe computer in the mid-1950s, with dialects of the language quickly spreading thereafter to other platforms. FORTRAN's powerful compiler, which translated human-readable code into code a computer could understand, produced incredibly clean and optimized standalone executable programs, all of which could be run independently of the compiler, setting the standard for decades to come--and overcoming the doubts of many skeptics along the way, who thought the FORTRAN project would never succeed. In the 1960s the language was standardized, with machine-dependent commands excised, and many platform-independent implementations followed. With the language now portable, able to run on any computer (at least in theory), FORTRAN, almost by accident, secured a stranglehold in the fields of science and engineering. The language also came to dominate in the supercomputing industry. But FORTRAN, a blue-collar workhorse more concerned with results than with style, was a victim of its own success--the language sowed the seeds of its own demise. New high-level languages sprouted up, stealing the good bits from FORTRAN while simultaneously defining themselves in opposition to it. FORTRAN had become the foil. As these new languages pierced the cutting edge of the programming landscape, they redefined computing paradigms (e.g., with structured programming, object-oriented programming, and the like), and FORTRAN--though eventually (and repeatedly) modernized and formally renamed Fortran--struggled to keep up through multiple standardization efforts, finally ceding significant ground to its successors as it slowly withdrew from the spotlight. To add insult to injury, even John Backus eventually turned against his creation. This is not a book on how to program in FORTRAN, nor is it a technical manual. Rather, the focus in Abstracting Away the Machine, which chronicles the complete history and development of the FORTRAN programming language, is set squarely on telling three interlocking stories: (1) How an elite group of computing trailblazers built FORTRAN, (2) Why the conditions at the time were ripe for them to succeed, and (3) What happened after they did. Tracing the long arc of FORTRAN's development and maturation is integral to understanding not only the history of programming but also the state of computer science today. The birth of FORTRAN planted a seed that led to the full flowering of high-level languages, since FORTRAN overcame initial skepticism by demonstrating to the world that a well-made HLL really could abstract away the machine.
