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Design Concepts in Programming Languages (MIT Press)
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this book.It isn't arrogance, it's just the semantics of the programming languages in question. Programming languages being such fundamental tools, you would think every programmer should understand them well, but that is far from being the case. It is tempting to blame programmers, but the real culprit is the subtlety and depth of the topic. Two great resources to get started are https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262201755/ and https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262690764/Anyway. A value is something you can bind to a variable. Unfortunately, you can't bind the list [1,2,3] (or whatever syntax you might prefer) to a variable in either Python or Lisp, because those languages simply don't have lists (or any other kind of compound value).
⬐ ScottBursonI read back through your recent comments. I notice you get downvoted a lot. Does this bother you?⬐ catnaroekI don't particularly mind.
"Where is a good place to get started with studying formal semantics?"I found "Design Concepts in Programming Languages" by Gifford and Turbak (http://www.amazon.com/Design-Concepts-Programming-Languages-...) well written and comprehensive. ( I am self taught too! :-))
⬐ silentbicycleI'll look into it, thanks!Branching off the links that fadmmatt posted above, I found a booklist (http://matt.might.net/articles/books-papers-materials-for-gr...) with a PDF of Nielson & Nielson's Semantics with Applications (http://www.daimi.au.dk/~bra8130/Wiley_book/wiley.pdf). That looks good, too.
It sounds like I'm used to reading operational semantics, but have usually seen them specified in S-Expressions (as mini-interpreters in Scheme).