Programming Languages

CSCI-GA.2110-001
Summer 2016

Textbooks

Required

Michael L. Scott. Programming Language Pragmatics, 4th edition (Morgan Kaufman 2016)

This is a excellent text that covers both language design and compiler fundamentals. In your readings for this course you don't need to study sections that deal with translation and compiler construction issues, but that material is interesting, and you will examine it in more detail when you take the Compiler Construction course.

Recommended

You ought to also have good books on C++ and Java. Rather than insist on any particular book, here are some recommendations:

The books written by the creators of C++ and Java are the standard references:

Stroustrup. The C++ programming Language, 3rd ed. (Addison-Wesley)
Ken Arnold, James Gosling, and David Holmes. The Java(TM) Programming Language, 4th ed. (Addison-Wesley)

For the remaining languages, there is a lot of information available on the web in the form of references and tutorials, so books may not be strictly necessary. However, if you are interested, a few recommendations follow.

John Barnes. Programming in Ada95, 2nd ed. (Addison Wesley)

We will also discuss functional languages, specifically Scheme and ML.

R. Kent Dybvig. The Scheme Programming Language. 4th Edition (MIT Press).
Jeffrey Ullman. Elements of ML Programming ML97 Edition, 2nd Edition. (Prentice Hall).

Time permitting, we will discuss scripting languages. Our exemplar will be Perl, and we may also touch on Python. The standard reference on Perl is also a great tutorial:

Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant: Programming Perl, 3rd ed. (O'Reilly)