This book provides a new, systematic and unified approach to the essential ideas of computer programming. While the traditional method is to describe various features of individual programming languages, this book emphasizes instead fundamental concepts common to all of them and the interrelations between these notions, thus enhancing the reader's insight into algorithms and their description.
The systematic development of the basic concepts leads moreover to methods for developing programs- from the specification of a problem to its implementation on a machine, and, in particular, from functional to procedural programs.
The book includes recent theoretical results from areas such as mathematical and operational semantics, fixed point theory, nondeterminism, and abstract data types, together with their application to program transformation and program correctness. In this way, it provides an introduction to the current topics of research, and prepares the student and the professional for the technical literature.