Study Guide for Programming Languages

Topics

Programming paradigms
- Imperative
- Functional: higher-order functions
- Logic: resolution, unification
Object-oriented programming: inheritance, subtyping
Language syntax
- Meta language, object language
- Regular expressions
- Context free grammars and Backus-Naur form
- Parse trees, abstract syntax trees, syntax graphs
- Ambiguous grammars
- Parsing, recursive descent parsing
- [Attribute grammars, deprecated]
Basic semantics
- Attributes, binding, and semantic functions
- Declarations, blocks, and scope
- Allocation, extent, and the environment
- Problems with aliasing and pointers
Types
- integers, floating point, IEEE 754, records, etc
- type insecurities, type checking, type inference
- type equivalence
- abstract data types and modularity
Polymorphism
- ad hoc: overloading, implicit coercion
- universal: parametric, subtype
Control
- loops
- procedures and parameters
- procedure closures, non-local variable access
- exception handling
Semantics: operational, denotational, axiomatic (only superficial knowledge)

Pay special attention to the two other paradigms: functional programming (especially ML) and logic programming (PROLOG). The chapter each in Sebesta is not enough.

References

The primary references are:

Robert W. Sebesta. Concepts of Programming Languages, fifth edition.
Reading, Masachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 2002. ISBN: 0-201-75295-6.
All chapters, except Chapter 11: Concurrency.
Webber, Adam Brooks. Modern Programming Languages: A Practical Introduction. Franklin, Beedle & Associates, 2003. ISBN: 1-887902-76-7
Mitchell, John Clifford Concepts of Programming Languages Introduction. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-521-78098-5

Other roughly equivalent textbooks exist:

Louden. Programming Languages, Principles and Practice
Scott. Programming Langauge Pragmatics
Sethi. Programming Languages, Concepts and Constructs
MacClennan. Principles of Programming Languages