This textbook is intended as a guide for programming-language designers and users to better help them understand consequences of design decisions. The text aims to provide readers with an overview of the design space for programming languages and how design choices affect implementation. It is not a classical compilers book, as it assumes the reader is familiar with basic compiler implementation techniques; nor is it a traditional comparative programming languages book, because it does not go into depth about any particular language, instead taking examples from a wide variety of programming languages to illustrate design concepts. Readers are assumed to already have done at least a bit of programming in functional, imperative, and object-oriented languages. Topics and features: Provides topic-by-topic coverage of syntax, types, scopes, memory management and more Includes many technical exercises and discussion exercises Inspires readers to think about language design choices, how these interact, and how they can be implemented Covers advanced topics such as formal semantics and limits of computation Suitable for advanced undergraduates and beginning graduates, this highly practical and useful textbook/guide will also offer programming language professionals a superb reference and learning toolkit.

The second edition of this textbook has been fully revised and adds material about loop optimisation, function call optimisation and dataflow analysis. It presents techniques for making realistic compilers for simple programming languages, using techniques that are close to those used in "real" compilers, albeit in places slightly simplified for presentation purposes. All phases required for translating a high-level language to symbolic machine language are covered, including lexing, parsing, type checking, intermediate-code generation, machine-code generation, register allocation and optimisation, interpretation is covered briefly. Aiming to be neutral with respect to implementation languages, algorithms are presented in pseudo-code rather than in any specific programming language, but suggestions are in many cases given for how these can be realised in different language flavours. Introduction to Compiler Design is intended for an introductory course in compiler design, suitable for both undergraduate and graduate courses depending on which chapters are used.