Design Concepts in Programming Languages

Design Concepts in Programming Languages, 9780262201759 (0262201755), MIT Press, 2008

This book is the text for 6.821 Programming Languages, an entry-level, singlesemester, graduate-level course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students that take our course know how to program and are mathematically inclined, but they typically have not had an introduction to programming language design or its mathematical foundations. We assume a reader with similar preparation, and we include an appendix that completely explains the mathematical metalanguage we use. Many of the exercises are taken directly from our problem sets and examination questions, and have been specifically designed to cause students to apply their newfound knowledge to practical (and sometimes impractical!) extensions to the foundational ideas taught in the course.

Our fundamental goal for Programming Languages is to use a simple and concise framework to teach key ideas in programming language design and implementation. We specifically eschewed an approach based on a tour of the great programming languages. Instead, we have adopted a family of syntactically simple pedagogical languages that systematically explore programming language concepts (see Appendix B). Contemporary concerns about safety and security have caused programmers to migrate to languages that embrace many of the key ideas that we explain. Where appropriate, we discuss how the ideas we introduce have been incorporated into contemporary programming languages that are in wide use.

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