Essentials of Programming Languages

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Essentials of Programming Languages (MIT Press, 2008. 3rd edition, ISBN 0-262-06279-8) is a book by Daniel P. Friedman, Mitchell Wand and Christopher T. Haynes on programming languages. EoPL is a text book that surveys the principles of programming languages from an operational perspective. It starts with an interpreter in Scheme for a simple functional core language similar to the lambda calculus and then systematically adds constructs. For each addition, for example, variable assignment or thread-like control, the book illustrates an increase in expressive power of the programming language and a demand for new constructs for the formulation of a direct interpreter. The book also demonstrates that systematic transformations, say store-passing style or continuation-passing style can eliminate certain constructs from the language in which the interpreter is formulated.