Great Works in Programming Languages

I guess I never linked to this before, even though I was certain I had. It's a list of papers selected by a community of programming language researchers as the most important and representative of the field. The collection is called Great Works in Programming Languages. Worth taking a look.

I have read and reviewed "An axiomatic basis for computer programming" by C.A.R. Hoare, here (in portuguese). I've read "A theory of type polymorphism in programming" by Milner more than once, and never finished "Towards a theory of type structure" by Reynolds. I also read the one by Landin ("The next 700 programming languages") and Plotkin's "Call-by-name, call-by-value, and the λ-calculus" is on my queue. Maybe someday I'll get back to them and post reviews.

Another new acquisition

I just got the book Proof, Language and Interaction: Essays in Honour of Robin Milner by mail. It's a hefty tome that's over 700 pages long, containing essays in various topics related to the work of Robin Milner. The best part is that while it costs around 80 dollars, I got it for 9 dollars plus shipping. This should be a rule: if you're a starving student in a third-world university and no institutional budget for buying expensive technical books, you can buy them for 10 dollars or so. There's always hope.

Anyway, my main interest in the book lies in the essays related to the π-calculus, especially the one on Pict, but the Harper-Stone paper on the semantics of Standard ML is also on my list, as is the essay by Mike Gordon "From LCF to HOL: A Short History". I'll probably look at many others, but I doubt I'll be able to understand much of some of them, like "From Banach to Milner: Metric Semantics for Second Order Communication and Concurrency".

All in all, a good acquisition, at a very good price.