Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages
Higher Order Symbol. Comput., 13 (1-2):
11--49 (Apr 1, 2000)DOI: 10.1023/a:1010000313106
Abstract
This paper forms the substance of a course of lectures given at the
International Summer School in Computer Programming at Copenhagen in
August, 1967. The lectures were originally given from notes and the
paper was written after the course was finished. In spite of this,
and only partly because of the shortage of time, the paper
still retains many of the shortcomings of a lecture course. The chief
of these are an uncertainty of aim—it is never quite clear what sort
of audience there will be for such lectures—and an associated
switching from formal to informal modes of presentation which may well
be less acceptable in print than it is natural in the lecture room.
For these (and other) faults, I apologise to the reader.There are numerous references throughout the course
to CPL 1–3. This is a programming
language which has been under development since 1962 at Cambridge and
London and Oxford. It has served as a vehicle for research into both
programming languages and the design of compilers. Partial
implementations exist at Cambridge and London. The language is still
evolving so that there is no definitive manual available yet. We hope
to reach another resting point in its evolution quite soon and to
produce a compiler and reference manuals for this version. The
compiler will probably be written in such a way that it is relatively
easyto transfer it to another machine, and in the first instance
we hope to establish it on three or four machines more or less at the
same time.The lack of a precise formulation for CPL should not cause
much difficulty in this course, as we are primarily concerned with
the ideas and concepts involved rather than with their
precise representation in a programming language.
