[PRL] Interesting-looking book

[Mitchell Wand]

I've only looked at the web site, not the book, but he makes some
noises that sound interesting.

--Mitch 

From: Peter Van Roy <pvr at info.ucl.ac.be>
To: concurrency at cwi.nl (moderated)
Subject: Programming textbook with broad coverage of concurrency
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 17:18:43 +0100 (MET)

The textbook 'Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer
Programming' is now available from MIT Press and Web bookstores.  It
gives a view of programming that is both broad and deep.  In
particular, it gives a broad view of concurrent programming: one third
of the book (300 pages) covers what we consider to be the three main
paradigms of general-purpose concurrent programming, namely
declarative (i.e., deterministic) concurrency, message-passing
concurrency, and shared-state concurrency.  The first one, especially,
has been unjustly forgotten in our opinion since its first published
appearance 30 years ago (we know of an article by Gilles Kahn from
1974).  Declarative concurrency cannot handle observable
nondeterminism, but in our experience, observable nondeterminism can
be confined to a very small part of most programs.

See http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/people/PVR/book.html for more information.
This Web site also gives course materials for a rather atypical second-year
course on programming: after starting with a declarative language, the next
concept it adds is concurrency, leading to declarative concurrency.  We
have been teaching with this approach since 2001 and we find it surprisingly
effective.

Peter Van Roy