Practical Foundations for Programming Languages

This book unifies a broad range of programming language concepts under the framework of type systems and structural operational semantics.

Robert Harper (Author)

9781107150300, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 4 April 2016

512 pages
26.4 x 17.8 x 3.2 cm, 1.08 kg

Review of previous edition: 'This book offers an excellent introduction to a wide range of programming language concepts. They are all uniformly and carefully explained, using techniques that are very useful in practice for both analysis and implementation of programming languages. The book is authored by one of the most prominent researchers in type theory for programming languages. The presentation is very effective and based on the author's years of experience teaching the material.' Lars Birkedal, IT University of Copenhagen

This text develops a comprehensive theory of programming languages based on type systems and structural operational semantics. Language concepts are precisely defined by their static and dynamic semantics, presenting the essential tools both intuitively and rigorously while relying on only elementary mathematics. These tools are used to analyze and prove properties of languages and provide the framework for combining and comparing language features. The broad range of concepts includes fundamental data types such as sums and products, polymorphic and abstract types, dynamic typing, dynamic dispatch, subtyping and refinement types, symbols and dynamic classification, parallelism and cost semantics, and concurrency and distribution. The methods are directly applicable to language implementation, to the development of logics for reasoning about programs, and to the formal verification language properties such as type safety. This thoroughly revised second edition includes exercises at the end of nearly every chapter and a new chapter on type refinements.

1. Judgment and rules
2. Statics and dynamics
3. Total functions
4. Finite data types
5. Types and propositions
6. Infinite data types
7. Variable types
8. Partiality and recursive types
9. Dynamic types
10. Subtyping
11. Dynamic dispatch
12. Control flow
13. Symbolic data
14. Mutable state
15. Parallelism
16. Concurrency and distribution
17. Modularity
18. Equational reasoning
19. Appendices.

Subject Areas: Programming & scripting languages: general [UMX]