文档介绍：Programming Languages:
Application and Interpretation
Shriram Krishnamurthi
Brown University
Copyright
c 2003, Shriram Krishnamurthi
This work is licensed under the
mons Attribution-mercial-ShareAlike United States License.
If you create a derivative work, please include the version information below in your attribution.
This book is available free-of-cost from the author’s Web site.
This version was generated on 2007-04-26.
ii
Preface
The book is the textbook for the programming languages course at Brown University, which is taken pri-
marily by third and fourth year undergraduates and beginning graduate (both MS and PhD) students. It
seems very accessible to smart second year students too, and indeed those are some of my most essful
students. The book has been used at over a dozen other universities as a primary or secondary text. The
book’s material is worth one undergraduate course worth of credit.
This book is the fruit of a vision for teaching programming languages by integrating the “two cultures”
that have evolved in its pedagogy. One culture is based on interpreters, while the other emphasizes a survey
of languages. Each approach has significant advantages but also huge drawbacks. The interpreter method
writes programs to learn concepts, and has its heart the fundamental belief that by teaching puter to
execute a concept we more thoroughly learn it ourselves.
While this reasoning is internally consistent, it fails to recognize that understanding definitions does
not imply we understand consequences of those definitions. For instance, the difference between strict
and lazy evaluation, or between static and dynamic scope, is only a few lines of interpreter code, but the
consequences of these choices is enormous. The survey of languages school is better suited to understand
these consequences.
The text therefore melds these two approaches. Concretely, students program with a new set of features
first, then try to distill