Polish notation

Abstract: The mid-twentieth century is searching for more humane views of philosophy, man and nature. It is therefore strange that Shaftesbury, with his keen awareness of the polarities of human existence—reason and emotion, theory and practice, self-interest and human interest—should so long have been overlooked. 'Dr Grean presents the fullest treatment of Shaftesbury's moral and religious thought written in this century; its clarity and scholarly flavour will appeal to specialists in the history of philosophy.'

Abstract: Companion papers give examples of the development of concurrent programs using a design notation which employs a number of concepts from object-oriented programming languages. This paper documents the semantics of the design language by providing a mapping to the pi-calculus.

Abstract: 1. Programming Principles. 2. Introduction to Software Engineering. 3. Stacks and Recursion. 4. Examples of Recursion. 5. Queues. 6. Lists. 7. Searching. 8. Sorting. 9. Tables and Information Retrieval. 10. Binary Trees. 11. Multiway Trees. 12. Graphs. 13. Case Study: The Polish Notation. Appendix A: Mathematical Methods. Appendix B: Random Numbers. Appendix C: Units, Include Files, and Utility Procedures. Appendix D: Pascal Features. Index.

Abstract: We investigate the use of the dot notation in the context of abstract types. The dot notation -- that is, a.f referring to the operation f provided by the abstraction a -- is used by programming languages such as Modula-2 and CLU. We compare this notation with the Mitchell-Plotkin approach, which draws a parallel between type abstraction and (weak) existential quantification in constructive logic. The basic operations on existentials coming from logic give new insights about the meaning of type abstraction, but differ completely from the more familiar dot notation. In this paper, we formalize simple calculi equipped with the dot notation, and relate them to a more classical calculus a la Mitchell and Plotkin. This work provides some theoretical foundations for the dot notation, and suggests some useful extensions.