Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages (1991)

https://bertrandmeyer.com/2022/09/28/introduction-theory-programming-languages-full-book-now-freely-available/

by ingve • 4 years ago

199 54 4 years ago

bertrandmeyer.com

isaacfrond• 4 years ago

Link to the book:

https://bertrandmeyer.com/wp-content/upLoads/introduction_to...

ingve• 4 years ago

Note the warning and request from the main book page:

(Please do not bookmark or share the above download link as it may change, but use the present page: https:/bertrandmeyer.com/ITPL.)

throwaway81523• 4 years ago

This book is from 1991. I haven't looked at it, I will do so, it looks promising, but my favorite intro(?) PLT book is Robert Harper's somewhat idiosyncratic Practical Foundations of Programming Languages (PFPL). Some older editions were freely available in entirety, and the current edition has an abridged version online but they make you pay for the full version.

I found that the older edition was enough to get a handle on the subject enough to read other sources.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/pfpl/

oxff• 4 years ago

my job here is done, was about to reco this too

raspberry1337• 4 years ago

Any place to read or get this that isn't a preview version?

lioeters• 4 years ago

https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Practical+Foundations+of+Pr...

kleiba• 4 years ago

Amazingly, judging from the font rendering, it seems that this book was written in MS Word?!

Pinus• 4 years ago

The text mentions troff and PIC. I wonder whether the author still has the source code... Even if re-rendering with modern tools ("modern" meaning "actually runs on platforms readily available today, e.g. groff and gpic") is more work than he’s willing to put in (which I quite understand), there ought to be someone on the Internet who is enough of a compsci/typography nerd to do it...

arjvik• 4 years ago

I know nothing about typography, so could you share which aspects of the type specifically stood out to you as bad typography?

LeonidasXIV• 4 years ago

The fact that it uses Times New Roman gives it a very (old) "MS Word" vibe.

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

I was able to reconstruct them from the original troff source using plain MS Word.

Also if you look into PDF properties it states the same.

tengwar2• 4 years ago

troff, but MS Word was available from 1983.

tailrecursion• 4 years ago

What gave me the most perspective on programming language design was reading Leslie Lamport's papers on TLA+. His views on the necessary differences between a P.L. and a specification language gave me a clearer idea what programming languages really are. If I recall, Lamport has several papers on TLA+ for mere mortals that are very easy to read.

cloogshicer2• 4 years ago

This sounds really great - could you recommend/link some specific ones? Thanks in advance!

cloogshicer2• 4 years ago

So a bit of digging brought up this [1], which seems to be a list of all relevant papers.

It's annotated with short summaries and historical background by Leslie Lamport himself. Seems like a great starting point!

Still, I'd love to hear some specific recommendations for the topic you mentioned, it sounds super interesting.

[1] https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html

tkhattra• 4 years ago

[1] is a particular one regarding specification languages and types. its background description about a "rabidly pro-types" referee is quite interesting...

[1] http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#lamport-type...

bromuk• 4 years ago

Did anyone else get taught Eiffel (by Bertrand) when they were at University? Such a cool little language for teaching object oriented paradigms. I think multiple inheritance was it's selling point, never seen it in industry though lol.

zasdffaa4• 4 years ago

I didn't like it. It was too much theory based without enough recognition of practice. I and a very small company used it ~25 years ago. It wasn't good enough & we eventually dumped it. I can't give you reasons why as it was too long ago but I don't have a good memory of it.

I do remember of the Eiffel book that Meyer was a bit too keen on emotive arguments over factual.

bitL3• 4 years ago

The zeal/tunnel vision of early OOP evangelists resembles the zeal of today's FP evangelists...

smitty1e2• 4 years ago

"The difference between theory and practice is greater in practice than in theory."--Herb Sutter

amval• 4 years ago

I did! It was not even _that_ long ago. I remember fondly reading the Eiffel book by Meyer, which was lenghty but full of interest tidbits and explanations.

However, using the language itself was a different story. This must have been around 2009. There was barely any documentation online, not to speak of libraries. One project required us to use some poorly documented, barely functioning and outdated GTK bindings.

I think I lacked enough of understanding about programming to fully appreciate the language (I remember mostly contracts, as something unusual but useful).

I think I will read this book, though: if it's anything like the Eiffel one, I am sure it's very fun and didactic.

anonymousDan• 4 years ago

Yes! At trinity college in dublin. Very interesting language with the pre and post specs.

thenanante• 4 years ago

Yes, at ETH Zürich. I'm not a big fan of Eiffel, but pre- & postconditions + invariants are a great way to verify simple functions in isolation. Still needs integration and end-to-end tests to verify sufficient correctness in a complex distributed environment. On top of that, I really don't like strong OOP. It can be misused so easily. Multiple inheritance sounds good in theory, but just based on some Java inheritance code nightmares I've seen in my career so far, think 10s of layers of deep nesting done by misusing inheritance; multiple inheritance would massively overcomplicate many codebases. I'm very happy the industry seems to move into a pragmatic middle ground, where both lightweight OOP and lightweight FP have their uses.

lbriner• 4 years ago

I never quite got it. We used it for a number of things back in the late 90s but to have all of the condition checking enabled made it run much slower, which was like most other languages at the time, you tested in debug and then released it in release mode.

Also, in reference to Ariane rocket explosion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariane_flight_V88) due to interger overflow, it wasn't clear how a precondition would have saved anything - an assertion made by Meyer. If it got to the relevant method and the precondition failed, you would still have to have forseen the possibility of error and coded for it, otherwise it might not have run the function but could still have catastrophically failed.

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

This is great, must have a paper copy somewhere on my university boxes, but it nice that is now available to anyone.

neebz• 4 years ago

Bertrand was one of my favorite people in the software field. I really wanted to do a Phd under his supervision.

sambeau• 4 years ago

This was on one of my set texts at University in the 1990s. I still own it (somewhere) and a few others in this series. There was a companion book by David Watt which covered the implementation of interpreters and compilers and used a small functional language that looked a little bit like Pascal, called Triangle. It was written in very plain, easy-to-understand language (and the code was simple to understand, too). I have Peyton Jones's 'The Implementation of FunctionalProgramming Languages' sitting on a shelf beside me, and I often like to look back at Bird & Wadler which is a classic, though I think I lent it to someone and never got it back.

amelius• 4 years ago

This title assumes that there is a single theory of programming languages, which is a bit strange.

jonsen• 4 years ago

Not at all:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_theory

candyman• 4 years ago

We used Eiffel to build a funds transfer system way back when, Maybe 1990 or so. I met Bertrand a couple of times because my mentor was a huge fan. He built systems in banking using Modula-2 before Eiffel came along. Last I saw Bertrand he was in Santa Barbara. It feels like disciplined programming is not popular anymore in favor hacking, continuous releases, agile, scrum, etc.

rramadass2• 4 years ago

It feels like disciplined programming is not popular anymore in favor hacking, continuous releases, agile, scrum, etc.

Rightly said!

I learnt "correct" OOD/OOP from his book Object-Oriented Software Construction (https://bertrandmeyer.com/oosc2/). It was one of the few books which actually looked at "Programming in the Large" specifically through the Object-Oriented lens and also instituted "Design By Contract (DbC)" within the Eiffel language to support it. DbC is a "user-friendly" version of the correct programming techniques espoused by Floyd/Hoare/Dijkstra. One can also say that it subsumes other techniques like TDD since a post-condition is like a unit test in itself. It is a shame people no longer study Meyer's works with the seriousness they should (he maybe a pedant but it is the right sort of pedantry) but instead run after buzzwords/fad of the month.

Here is Bertrand Meyer's take (the right one, imo) on Agile from his book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly - https://learning.acm.org/techtalks/agile.

asib• 4 years ago

What makes you say continuous deployment, agile, scrum are in contest with disciplined programming? Maybe I’m misinterpreting the meaning of that term.

mindcrime• 4 years ago

disciplined programming is not popular anymore in favor hacking, continuous releases, agile, scrum, etc.

Wait what? Disciplined programming is not mutually exclusive with at least 3 of those 4 things (continuous releases, agile, scrum). If people treat those things as opposed to disciplined programming, it's because they don't understand the actual principles underlying them.

siraben• 4 years ago

For those who are self-studying, I recommend Software Foundations[0] which uses the Coq proof assistant, since doing the exercises is far more engaging when Coq lets you finish the proof and you know for sure that you have understood the concepts involved.

[0] https://softwarefoundations.cis.upenn.edu/

nudpiedo• 4 years ago

I see it is mostly focused on semantics: operational, translational, denotational, axiomatic, complementary.

I wish there were more books focused on that aspect. I will definitely take a look at it over the weekend.

rramadass2• 4 years ago

1) Formal Syntax and Semantics of Programming Languages: A Laboratory Based Approach by Kenneth Slonneger and Barry Kurtz - https://homepage.divms.uiowa.edu/~slonnegr/ (PDFs are available on the web).

2) You may also find Cliff B. Jones' book Understanding Programming Languages useful.

Excerpt from the preface;

Fortunately, there is a less expensive way of sorting out the meaning of a programming language than writing a compiler. This book is about describing the meaning (semantics) of programming languages. A major objective is to teach the skill of writing semantic descriptions because this provides a way to think out and make choices about the semantic features of a programming language in a cost effective way. In one sense a compiler (or an interpreter) offers a complete formal description of the semantics of its source language. But it is not something that can be used as a basis for reasoning about the source language; nor can it serve as a definition of a programming language itself since this must allow a range of implementations. Writing a formal semantics of a language can yield a far shorter description and one about which it is possible to reason. To think that it is a sensible engineering process to go from a collection of sample programs directly to coding a compiler would be naive in the extreme. What a formal semantic description offers is a way to think out, record and analyse design choices in a language; such a description can also be the basis of a systematic development process for subsequent compilers. To record a description of the semantics of a language requires a notation —a “meta-language”. The meta-language used in this book is simple and is covered in easy steps throughout the early chapters.

mkehrt• 4 years ago

For a good look at type theory and its relationship to operational semantics in particular, Pierce's Types and Programming Languages is the classic. I suspect Harper's Practical Foundations for Programming Languages has a similar approach though I've not read it.

Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages (1991)

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