Tutorial on programming language research

Abstract

Rowe: I am going to talk a little about data abstraction from a programming language viewpoint. I suspect that what I will say in some places will be every bit as controversial amongst programming language folks, as what Dennis said was amongst database folks. Historically, programming languages evolve continually, from very low-level representations or descriptions of computations to higher-level descriptions. The idea is to express computations in a way that makes them easier to write, faster to debug, and make them survive change. All these marvelous buzzwords!