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Advanced Programming Language Design by Raphael A Finkel Recommended

ISBN: 0 8053 1191 2       Publisher: Addison-Wesley       Pages: 480pp       Price: £49-00

Categories:   languages     compilers

Reviewed by Francis Glassborow in C Vu 9-4 (May 1997)

The author has an encyclopaedic knowledge of existing programming languages and classifies languages under seven headings. These include dataflow, concurrent and aggregate-based together with the better known functional, object-oriented and logic. Couple these with the best-known group--imperative (often called procedural) languages--and you have a rich menu to study. Such study can be very rewarding.

It is a pity that working programmers, even if they have the interest, probably lack time to study texts such as this. Had they the time they would find that there are far more ways of approaching a programming problem than they think. They might discover that the ideas found in this book would encourage them to seek out other tools that could add greatly to the range of solutions available to them.

Just as the study of human language can broaden your perspective (the more diverse the languages the better, try adding Arabic, Bengali and Chinese to your present set) so can a study of the artificial languages of our computers.

If you have the time, I would hope that you would accept the challenge of reading a book such as this one. The subject matter is technically demanding but the author has avoided wrapping it up in overly academic language.