[off-topic] Survey or book on programming language structures

[off-topic] Survey or book on programming language structures

[David Mentre]

Hello,

This is not strictly Caml related, but as the OCaml language offers
several ways to program (functionnal, imperative, OO, ...), I think
people on this list will have knowledged advices.

I'm looking for a survey or a book describing the various ways to
structure a program and its data (functionnal, object-oriented,
imperative, abstract data types, ...). I would particularly be
interested in a common framework where common issues (polymorphism,
adaptability, abstractions, genericity, ...) are described and solved
by each formalism.

To give an example, polymorphism can be expressed in an object-oriented
way (so called inheritance polymorphism) and ML-like way (so called
parametric polymorphism). Both ways with there strengths. Is there a
survey that tries to describe other formalisms in a common framework?

I've found books on certain kind of programming languages (for example
object oriented) but not for different kind of languages (except few
excerpts in Pierre and Xavier's book).

Thanks in advance,
david
-- 
 David.Mentre@inria.fr -- http://www.irisa.fr/prive/dmentre/
 Opinions expressed here are only mine.

Re: [off-topic] Survey or book on programming language structures

[Markus Mottl]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2001, David Mentre wrote:
> I'm looking for a survey or a book describing the various ways to
> structure a program and its data (functionnal, object-oriented,
> imperative, abstract data types, ...). I would particularly be
> interested in a common framework where common issues (polymorphism,
> adaptability, abstractions, genericity, ...) are described and solved
> by each formalism.

A very nice book is the following one ("Advanced Programming Language
Design" - 512 pages) by Raphel Finkel, especially because it is available
online free of charge as PDF:

  http://cseng.aw.com/book/related/0,3833,0805311912+20,00.html

It covers just about any programming paradigm and also gives a soft
introduction to formal programming language semantics. It seems that it
is exactly what you are looking for...

Best regards,
Markus Mottl

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl

Re: [off-topic] Survey or book on programming language structures

[David Mentre]

Hi Markus,

Markus Mottl <mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at> writes:

>   http://cseng.aw.com/book/related/0,3833,0805311912+20,00.html
> 
> It covers just about any programming paradigm and also gives a soft
> introduction to formal programming language semantics. It seems that it
> is exactly what you are looking for...

Thank you for this reference. I've already quickly looked at it (too
quickly?) but found it not very informative. The author just go through
various programming paradigms and the languages that embodies them but
it does not try to _compare_ the paradigms (except within one category,
i.e. OO, functionnal, ...).

I am more interested in a comparison of paradigms in a broader view (how
adaptation is handled by functionnal and object-oriented styles for
example) and a formalization (i.e. theorical presentation) of those
paradigms in a common framework. 

Anyway, thank you for your pointer,
Best regards,
d.
-- 
 David.Mentre@inria.fr -- http://www.irisa.fr/prive/dmentre/
 Opinions expressed here are only mine.

Re: [off-topic] Survey or book on programming language structures

[Markus Mottl]

On Mon, 22 Jan 2001, David Mentre wrote:
> I am more interested in a comparison of paradigms in a broader view (how
> adaptation is handled by functionnal and object-oriented styles for
> example) and a formalization (i.e. theorical presentation) of those
> paradigms in a common framework. 

Ok, so your question is mostly about software engineering (programming
in the large) rather than expressiveness on an algorithmic level. The
book is mostly concerned with the latter...

Since you seem to be more interested in high-level (formal) specification
of programs, you might find some things (for functional style = ML)
on this page (but no inter-language comparisons):

  http://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/dts

And then there is also Xavier's paper on "Objects and Classes vs. Modules
in OCaml".

  http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/talks/icfp99.ps.gz

- Markus

-- 
Markus Mottl, mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at, http://miss.wu-wien.ac.at/~mottl

Re: [off-topic] Survey or book on programming language structures

[Xavier Leroy]

> I'm looking for a survey or a book describing the various ways to
> structure a program and its data (functionnal, object-oriented,
> imperative, abstract data types, ...). I would particularly be
> interested in a common framework where common issues (polymorphism,
> adaptability, abstractions, genericity, ...) are described and solved
> by each formalism.

I'm afraid such a framework doesn't exist yet, and this looks a lot
like an open research issue.  There are some research papers that
might be relevant to your question, such as:

        John C. Reynolds, "User-defined types and procedural data structures
        as complementary approaches to data abstraction", pp 13-23 of
        "Theoretical aspects of object-oriented programming", ed.
        C. Gunter and J. Mitchell, MIT Press, 1994.

(Compares two ways to achieve representation hiding: the OO way and
the abstract type way.)  But I cannot think of anything more
comprehensive.

Good luck,

- Xavier Leroy