This book, edited by C. B. Jones, is a collection of papers gathered after Bekic’s untimely death in 1982. Clearly, Hans Bekic was one of the leaders in formal semantics of programming languages. But, even when he was alive, he did not write up much of his work (the book includes talk about missed publication deadlines, unwritten ideas, etc.). This lack of formal written organization of his work has made it difficult to produce a cohesive description of Bekic’s achievement. The editor has done an admirable task of organizing, but Bekic’s own disorganization shows through clearly.

Nevertheless, I found this book fascinating. I “saw” the evolution of the formal descriptions of ALGOL and PL/I. I “experienced” Bekic’s own evolution from operational semantics to denotational semantics.

But what I will carry away from my reading of this book is not his specifics of description (whose forms continually changed), but the awareness of his struggle to apply formal mathematics, indeed to develop formal mathematics, for concepts in the language domain. Describing the semantics of programming languages still eludes computer scientists today; Hans Bekic’s collected writings show a man who would have continued to work diligently at this task.