Understanding Programming Languages

The choice of a programming language is one of the most important factors that influence the ultimate quality of a software system. Unfortunately, too many programmers have poor linguistic skills: they are passionately in love with their "native" language, but are not able to analyze language constraints. "Understanding Programming Languages" is written for the purpose of explaining what alternatives are available to the language designer; how language constructs should be used in terms of safety and readability; how language constructs are implemented and which ones can be efficiently complied; and what is the role of language in expressing and enforcing abstractions. The book compares constructs from C with constructs from Ada in terms of levels of abstractions. Studying these languages provides a firm foundation for an extensive examination of object-oriented language support in C++ and Ada 95. The final chapters introduce functional (ML) and logic (Prolog) programming languages to demonstate that imperative languages are not conceptual necesseties for programming.