Programming Language Pragmatics [Paperback]

Michael L. Scott (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann (October 27, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1558605789
• ISBN-13: 978-1558605787
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,752,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

51 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Outstanding introduction to programming languages and their compilers, February 7, 2006

By 

Lars Tackmann (Copenhagen, Denmark) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Programming Language Pragmatics (Hardcover)

Over the years the Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools (2nd Edition) (also knwon as the dragon book) has become the de facto standard for introducing compilers and related topics at universities. This is very unfortunate because "Programming Language Pragmatics" is in a completely different league and should be the one used instead. It gives the student (or the self taught) a complete and through overview of parsing, grammar, automata theory and other key language constructs. What really differentiates this book from others (and most notably the (in)famous "Dragon Book") is that it does so in a easy to understand manner and with lots of well written examples.

Many people find compiler and language theory to be dark magic, and it would be wrong not to acknowledge that these subjects are considerably harder than say creating a web page in PHP or writing a small Java/C# program. But much of the confusion also stems from the long history of porly written books which all have lacked explaining key areas or assumed that the readers just know some obscure CS topics beforehand. This book does not travel down that road, it is well written, contains both simple and advanced examples and is simply a delightful read.

47 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Required for every Compiler Engineer, February 20, 2005

By 

Jos van Roosmalen (The Netherlands, Europe) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Programming Language Pragmatics (Paperback)

This is must read for every compiler engineer.

This book is 800+ pages of theory behind language design and processing of languages.

Altought it is very theoretical, it's very easy to read and well written and a pleasure to read. There are a lot of examples/figures/tables etc to explain things. I recommend people which are totally new to language design/compiler design to first read an introduction text. I can really recommend 'programming language processors in java' from Watt and Brown. This is a really good book.

The title of the book suggest that this book will only cover Language Design. In reality chapter 2, 3,4 and 5 covers in depth resp. Syntax checking (parsing), Names/Scope/Binding, Semantic Analysis and processor architecture.

Beside in depth analysis of language design (e.g. OO-, functional-, imperative- and logical-languages) it gives some practical implementation advice/tips. E.g. there are only a few compilerbooks which seriously talks about the different parsing error recovery techniques. This book explain some different recovery methods. Probably error recovery is not scientific enough for the other books, but for a compiler user error recovery is really important.

A last tip: this book comes in 2 editions: a paperback and hardcover edition. If you want to save some money buy the paperback.

34 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough Topic - Crystal Clear Explanation, June 3, 2001

By 

Cher-Wah Tan (Texas, SA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Programming Language Pragmatics (Hardcover)

I have always enjoyed reading programming-language and compiler books and most of them are quite tough on a first-read.

Programming Language Pragmatics is one huge exception. None of the books I have read come close to the clarity that this book exhibits. On many occassions, the choice of words and presentation in this book has made me go 'Wow, I thought I already knew this stuff...'

Besides core topics, it has interesting discussion like concurrency, data-abstraction (object-oriented) and non-imperative programming models (functional and logic).

TOC (with my comments)

Ch. 1 Introduction

Ch. 2 Programming Language Syntax (theory of Regular Expression, Context-Free Grammars, Automata etc)

Ch. 3 Names, Scopes, and Bindings (binding, scope rules, closures etc)

Ch. 4 Semantic Analysis (attribute grammars, attribute flow, syntax tree etc)

Ch. 5 Assembly-Level Computer Architecture (keeping the pipeline full, register allocation etc)

Ch. 6 Control Flow

(expression evaluation, iteration, recursion, nondeterminacy etc)

Ch. 7 Data Types (type checking, pointers and recursive types etc)

Ch. 8 Subroutines and Control Abstraction (stack layout, calling sequences, parameter passing etc)

Ch. 9 Building a Runnable Program (back-end compiler structure, intermediate forms etc)

Ch. 10 Data Abstraction and Object Orientation (encapsulation, inheritance, dynamic method binding, multiple inheritance, the object model of smalltalk)

Ch. 11 Nonimperative Programming Models: Functional and Logic Languages

Ch. 12 Concurrency (shared memory, message passing etc)

Ch. 13 Code Improvement (peephole, redundancy elimination, data flow analysis, loop improvement, instruction scheduling, register allocation etc)

App. A Programming Languages Mentioned

App. B Language Design and Language Implementation

This is a very impressive book; truly one of my best investments in books so far.