New books: December 1981

A combination of books and articles caught my attention this time around. In a smooth and witty fashion, the authors cover all aspects of programming languages, their features, functions, definitions , structures. They do very well in some of the harder to understand areas such as abstraction and applicative languages. Definitions are clear and there are many exercises of the "do-able" type. There are examples from everyone's favorite language Apt and BASIC through APL and Ada. from The book is recommended for any first course in Programming Languages or for self-study. The section entitled "Enhancement" containing chapters on I/O, dynamic data structures, exception handling, and parallel processing could be recommended for collateral reading in an operating systems course. Anyone interested in programming languages should get aho]d of the Datamation special report on Software and Services (August 25, 1981) and read the Sojka and Dorn "Magic Moments in Software." Here you will find out that parentheses were important even before Lisp (1957), you will discover the last (?) time that a COBOL program was tra~nsferred sans change (1960), and you will learn what 0 I0 was (1966). These and other historical highlights are surveyed in this brief, amusing, and well-written article.