Description:
In the third volume of the Handbook of Programming Languages series--Little Languages and Tools--editor Peter H. Salus presents several domain-specific programming languages and tools that are critical to getting certain jobs done in real-world applications. Though it is not by any means a comprehensive survey of such "little" languages, this volume covers many of the important ones. The book starts with a discussion of Pic--a special-purpose language used to generate line drawings and that was used to create all of the diagrams in this volume. Next, there is a chapter on the EQN language for typesetting mathematical formulas. The volume continues with chapters on domain-specific languages in general and Unix formatting languages. Chapters 5 and 6 cover the awk and sed Unix utilities. A lengthy discussion of SQL and Tcl/Tk follows. The volume also covers Perl and Python--an amazingly useful freeware object-oriented scripting language. To round off this eclectic selection of languages, volume 3 finishes with coverage of several simple music-oriented languages such as MIDI, MUTRAN, and DDM. Even seasoned programmers are likely to be introduced to new languages in this volume.--Stephen Plain
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