Vitali Sh. Kaufman

Programming Languages: Concepts & Principles

Preface to the Second Edition

Not to the least surprise of the author himself, this book was shown to be in popular use even after 17 years of the day it was brought to existence (as far as the author knows, it is constantly used in Moscow State University (MSU), University of Aerospace Technology and in other notable Russian Universities.) This demand for the book is even more surprising when considering the fact that the main body and materials of the book were prepared significantly prior to its publishing, approximately in 1985.

In the internet there are also circulating (and even sold, allegedly with the permission of the author J) relatively early variations of the lecture from the course “Programming Languages”, lectured by the author himself in those early years at the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics of MSU.

Many respectable members of the programming community saw it necessary to support the author’s confidence in the great value of the material presented in the book. Vladimir I. Golovach in his review in «Computer-Press» was one of the first one’s to predict the book’s long life cycle. Andrei A. Terekkhov, a famous expert in computing literature, also personally praised the high quality of the book. Very positive recalls of the book were also received from Vladimir A. Billig, Ruslan P. Bogatyriev, Lev N. Chernyshov  and many others. Enormous gratitude to these people for the support and encouragement so much needed in creation of the present edition.

A good few of outstanding members of the programming community mentioned in the book, many of whom the author was lucky enough to know personally and even discuss with them fragments of the book or the lecture of the course read at MSU, are unfortunately no longer amongst us. These include Evgeni A. Zhogolev, Aleksander V. Zamulin, Mihail R. Shura-Bura, Valentin Phjodorovich Turchin; interminable gratitude to them for their priceless contribution to the common practise.хорошо бы это тож

Republication of the book, regardless of existing inquiries, still just a while ago seemed as a completely unreal task to the author, considering his 100% occupation with his primary job. The seemingly impossibility of the task was due to the fact that the electronic makeup of the book was lost as the result of numerous perturbations of the stormy 1990’s.

However luckily, the world is full of wonders and one of them came knocking on the author’s door. Resurrection of the complete, electronic version of the book via help of modern scanning techniques (turning the printed original version and the following hand-written editions into electronic form) was now reality. This whole, enormous task was performed single-handedly by and only due to the personal initiative of Olga L. Bondarenko. As if by magic, around the same times arrived the offer of Dimitri A. Movchan to republish the book in DMK-press.

The author was only left with the relatively simple task of editing the Word-document received from Olga L. Bondarenko and passing it on to DMK-press, in hope of helping people who desire to gain a deep insight into the heart of problems, principles and concepts of modern-day programming.

Good luck, my most respectable Reader!

Vitali Sh. Kaufman

12.04.10  Moscow-Helsinki