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Types and Programming Languages

Types and Programming Languages
Details | Description | Customer Reviews
By: Benjamin C. Pierce (Author)  (Hardcover - 2002)
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» Hardcover: (645 pages)
» Publisher:  The MIT Press (February 01, 2002)
» ISBN: 0262162091
» Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 8.3 x 1.3 inches
» Amazon.com Sales Rank: #163,697 in Books
» Average Customer Review: 
     
 
 
Book Description
A type system is a syntactic method for automatically checking the absence of certain erroneous behaviors by classifying program phrases according to the kinds of values they compute. The study of type systems--and of programming languages from a type-theoretic perspective -- -has important applications in software engineering, language design, high-performance compilers, and security.This text provides a comprehensive introduction both to type systems in computer science and to the basic theory of programming languages. The approach is pragmatic and operational; each new concept is motivated by programming examples and the more theoretical sections are driven by the needs of implementations. Each chapter is accompanied by numerous exercises and solutions, as well as a running implementation, available via the Web. Dependencies between chapters are explicitly identified, allowing readers to choose a variety of paths through the material.The core topics include the untyped lambda-calculus, simple type systems, type reconstruction, universal and existential polymorphism, subtyping, bounded quantification, recursive types, kinds, and type operators. Extended case studies develop a variety of approaches to modeling the features of object-oriented languages.



Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
4.6 out of 5 stars (13 customer reviews)
13 Reviews
5 star:
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4 star:
 (2)
3 star:    (0)
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53 of 57 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars An accessible yet thorough introduction to type systems, December 29, 2002
By 
Jason M Kinzer (Oklahoma City, OK USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Types and Programming Languages (Hardcover)
This text is perhaps the most accessible yet thorough introduction to type systems I've encountered.
On the one hand, it offers excellent grounding: practical motivation is provided, numerous examples illustrate the concepts, and implementations are provided which can be used to typecheck and evaluate these examples. At various points, extended demonstrations of the type systems under consideration are given (e.g. showing how objects may be encoded). The exercises are well constructed and in many cases, accompanied with answers and detailed explanations in the appendix.
On the other hand, it offers an excellent exposition of the material: Pierce provides a lucid account of the static and dynamic semantics (primarily small-step operational) for various lambda calculi. He proceeds in a stepwise fashion via the gradual accretion of features: from first order (simply typed) systems to higher order systems incorporating bounded subtyping and recursion. He also gives attention to... Read more
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26 of 26 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Just right, June 3, 2007
By 
Jason Orendorff (Nashua, NH USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Types and Programming Languages (Hardcover)
This is a textbook about programming language theory, somewhat mathematical-- but it's must-read material for anyone who wants to gripe about programming languages cluefully, much less design them.

For me, this book strikes exactly the right balance between theory and practicality. Chapters on the mathematical properties of various tiny programming languages are interleaved with chapters that provide annotated implementations of those languages.

The book will also give you the background (notation and terminology) you'll need to read cutting-edge research papers on programming language theory.

This book contains all the information I was missing. Excellent presentation of the material, well written, great exercises, doesn't go off into lala-land. Highly recommended. Some math background very helpful (you need to know what a mathematical proof is).
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book, April 6, 2008
By 
agentzh (San Francisco, CA, USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Types and Programming Languages (Hardcover)
Writing baby interpreters using OCaml for the funny languages (include lambda calculus!) used in the theoretic chapters is a pretty cool idea and I really like it.

Elementary discrete mathematics and first-order logic are required for grokking the maths materials through out the book though. If you don't have enough patience to deal with math symbols, theorems, and formal proving, then this is not the right book for you ;)

IHMO, this is a highly comprehensible book for introducing lambda-calculus and type theory to readers without much background knowledge in either abstract algebra or theoretic computer science (like me ;)). I've been looking for such a book for long, in fact :)

Besides, this was the very book which directly inspired the birth of Pugs (a Perl 6 interpreter/compiler in Haskell) according to Audrey, the Pugs project's leader.

Highly recommended!
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