Programming Language Concepts

In the US this would be considered a hybrid of a compiler text and a comparative language course; I believe the two go well together. The book uses a functional programming language (F#) as the meta-language in which to present all concepts and examples, and thus has the operational flavour, enabling practical experiments and exercises. The book covers basic concepts such as abstract syntax, interpretation, stack machines, compilation, type checking, and garbage collections technique, as well as more advanced topics such as polymorphic types, type inference using the union-find algorithm and levels, co- and contravariance, continuations, and on-the-fly peephole optimization in backwards code generation. The book covers practical construction of lexers and parsers, but does not cover regular expressions, automata and grammars, well covered elsewhere; The book throws light on the design and technology of Java and C# to strengthen students' understanding of these widely used languages. This second edition will contain various updates, a new chapter on just-in-time compilers (underpinning both the Java and C#/.NET platforms), a new synthesis chapter on implementing a functional language Micro-SML, better coverage of garbage collection (including parallel and concurrent garbage collection), better coverage of the memory hierarchy, and discussions of the impact of concurrency where relevant.