Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enjoyed the Class, Didn't care for the Textbook, July 16, 2002
I took Friedman's undergraduate Programming Languages course at Indiana University and though this book was the required text
Friedman used it sparingly, as did I. It's full of formal programming language theory and enough EBNF grammars to satisfy the purist while confusing the practioner. To Friedman's credit, he is realistic about the book's audience (graduate,doctoral, and post-doctoral) and about the prevalence of Scheme outside of academia. The chapters on continuations and object oriented programming, however, are quite accessible and interesting reading. Though he doesn't do it much in the book, Friedman decoupled the course from Scheme several times and we examined everything from C's setjmp, longjmp mechanisms to C++'s virtual method lookup implementation. Word of advice to those taking a course taught by Friedman: Don't miss a single lecture or you will be hopelessly lost.
Buy this book if you are interested in formal programming language theory. Don't buy this book if you are interested in learning a specific language or are put off by a dense, rigorous approach to learning programming languages. In any event, best
of luck with your studies.
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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Almost Perfect Book, August 29, 2005
This book is invaluable to someone who is trying to understand how computer languages really work.
The Good
1. Very comprehensive .Covers a whole gamut of programming language features.By the time you finish the book you will have built interpreters which demonstrate recursion, call-by-value/reference/need and name semantics, class based and prototype based OO, type inference ,Continuations etc .
2. Very "Hands on" . You are taught how programming languages work by actually building intrepreters (in other words an Operational Semantics is used) .This is the best way to learn .
3.Environments and Continuations are explained extremely well.
4.Lots of exercises which explore design alternatives . For example the main flow deals with lexical binding of variables, with dynamic binding left as an exercise.
The Bad
1. A certain knowledge of scheme (let letrec, cond) etc is assumed (The First edition was better in this respect and was more self contained)
2.The writing is sometimes unnecessarily dense with long sentences and slighly disjonted paragraphs.
3.some essential features of a language design (eg: memory management ) are skipped entirely.While this is understandable from the pov of reducing the length of the book, it also means that one needs to read supplementary material before one can write real life interpreters.
4.Some parts of the interpretation/compilation process are skipped entirely or treated through "magic". For example the book provides practically no explanation of lexing or parsing and some "magic " code (SLLGEN) is used .The examples for using this framework are thoroughly inadequate.It is better to skip using this framework and just use list syntax and the read functionality of scheme .
Summary
With all its faults (which will probably get fixed in the next edition ) this is an incredible book and should be part of the library of every programmer interested in learning how languages work. As far as i know there isn't a single other book that can do better in conveying how various features of languages really work and interact .
While this book may not be suitable for an undergraduate course of study(withoout an excellent teacher to help students get ove r the difficult bits) it is ideal for the self taught programmer .
If you don't mind reading extra material/browsing the web to supplement this book, just buy it.
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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Programming Language Text, September 20, 1997
By A Customer
I've used this book to teach an undergraduate programming language for 4 years now. I believe it to be the finest text in the area because of its approach to the subject. Many books in this area are what I call smorgasborg books--leading the reader through one language syntax after another without ever getting to what really matters: programming language operation. In EoPL, Freidman, Wand, and Haynes solve this problem by using a standard technique of computer science: using the right langauge for the job. In this case the job is progrmaming language operation and the language is Scheme. Don't be fooled into thinking you're learning Scheme--you're actually learning a great deal about programming languages along the way.
The book covers the operational semantics of the most important features in programming languages and give users a clear understanding of the infrastructure of programming langauges along the way. Highly recommended.
See http://lal.cs.byu.edu/cs330 for a course based on this book.
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