Overview
- Emphasizes the design of full-fledged, fully normalizing Lambda-calculus machinery, as opposed to the just weakly normalizing machines
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series (TTCS)
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About this book
The book addresses ways and means of organizing computations, highlighting the relationship between algorithms and the basic mechanisms and runtime structures necessary to execute them using machines. It completely abstracts from concrete programming languages and machine architectures, taking instead the lambda calculus as the basic programming and program execution model to design various abstract machines for its correct implementation.
The emphasis is on fully normalizing machines based on full-fledged beta-reductions as essential prerequisites for symbolic computations that treat functions and variables truly as first-class objects. Their weakly normalizing counterparts are shown to be functional abstract machines that sacrifice the flavors of full beta-reductions for decidedly simpler runtime structures and improved runtime efficiency. Further downgrading of the lambda calculus leads to classical imperative machines that permit side-effecting operations on the runtime environment.
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Keywords
Table of contents (14 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
From the reviews:
"This remarkable monograph is an extremely well-written and pleasant and reading about abstract computing machines … . The author chooses a somewhat ‘imperative’ approach to teaching, which results in the survey of a vast number of concepts provided with many useful examples. The expository style is most favourable, which could be of special value for a reader with no strong background in the area. … Altogether, this is a book worth reading." (Vladimir Komendantsky, Mathematical Reviews, Issue 2007 k)
Authors, Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Received a Dr. rer. nat. degree in physics from the Technical University Munich/Germany in 1968; worked in industrie/research institutes at the central laboratories of Siemens AG between 1963 and 1968, at Bell Northern Research Ltd in Ottawa/Canada between 1969, and 1972 at the Gesellschaft fuer Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung in St. Augustin/Germany between 1973 and 1978; became an associate professor of computer science at the University of Bonn/Germany in 1978; became a full professor of computer science at the University of Kiel/Germany retired in 2003.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Abstract Computing Machines
Book Subtitle: A Lambda Calculus Perspective
Authors: W. Kluge
Editors: W. Brauer, G. Rozenberg, A. Salomaa
Series Title: Texts in Theoretical Computer Science. An EATCS Series
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/b138965
Publisher: Springer Berlin, Heidelberg
eBook Packages: Computer Science, Computer Science (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-540-21146-4Published: 18 February 2005
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-642-05938-4Published: 10 November 2010
eBook ISBN: 978-3-540-27359-2Published: 02 December 2005
Series ISSN: 1862-4499
Series E-ISSN: 1862-4502
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIV, 384
Number of Illustrations: 89 b/w illustrations
Topics: Programming Languages, Compilers, Interpreters, Logics and Meanings of Programs