Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

1.7 What You Will Learn

The following is a succinct summary of some of the topics about which readers can expect to learn:

• fundamental and universal concepts of programming languages (e.g., scope and parameter passing) and the options available for them (e.g., lexical scoping, pass-by-name/lazy evaluation), especially from an implementation-oriented perspective

• language definition and description methods (e.g., grammars)

• how to design and implement language interpreters, and implementation strategies (e.g., inductive data types, data abstraction and representation)

• different styles of programming (e.g., functional, declarative, concurrent programming) and how to program using languages supporting those styles (e.g., Python, Scheme, ML, Haskell, ...