Programming Linguistics examines a wide range of programming language designs, from Fortran to the newest research languages, to discover their common patterns, relationships, and antecedents. In studying the evolution of programming languages, the authors are also studying a series of answers to the central (and still unanswered) questions of what programs are and how they should be built.Programming Linguistics approaches language design as an attempt to define the nature of programming and the shape and structure of programs, rather than as the attempt to solve a series of narrow, disjoint technical problems. It emphasizes the structural-engineering rather than mathematical approach to programming, the importance of aesthetics and elegance in the success of language design, and provides an integrated treatment of concurrency and parallelism.Its readable and informal but rigorous coverage of the gamut of programming language designs is based on a simple and general programming model called the Ideal Software Machine. There are helpful exercises throughout.

Language deserves to be considered among the most important universal paradigms of today culture. In favor of this claim, I published, during the last 50 years, many books and articles. Here is a selection of 40 papers calling attention on some aspects which, despite their intrinsic interest, are absent from the most existing syntheses devoted to languages. We go across a large diversity of topics, bridging natural languages, combinatorics, computer science, brain studies, molecular genetics, chemical isoprenoid structures, human needs, infinite words, formal languages, learning processes, economics, sociology, logic, philosophy, symmetry and art; in all these fields a language structure is involved. Existential and computational entities, analytic and generative approaches, discrete and continuous structures, grammars and numbers, infinite words, symmetry phenomena and art, all are involved in proving that words and languages are everywhere in the universe and in the human and social life. There are also some studies concerning topics of general interest, such as the evolution of the idea of a mathematical proof, a typology of imprecision, Duns Scotus' work concerning the existence, the unicity and the infinity of God. Two interviews complete the book.