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

[Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr>]

> 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