Peter H. Salus is the author of A Quarter Century of UNIX (1994) and Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond (1995). He is an internationally recognized expert and has been the keynote speaker at Uniforum Canada, the UKUUG, the NLUUG, and the OTA (Belgium) in the past few years. He has been executive director of the USENIX Association and of the Sun User Group and vice president of the Free Software Foundation. He was the managing editor of Computing Systems (MIT Press) from 1987 to 1996. He writes on a variety of computing topics in a number of magazines. His Ph.D. in linguistics (New York University, 1963) has led him from natural languages to computer languages.

Volume IV begins with the Logic Programming group, all descended from John McCarthy's LISP of the late 1960s. The Volume begins with a few pages from the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual, a vital token of things to come and moves on to LISP's offspring: LISP, Scheme, Guile, and CLOS. Finally, Jamie Andrews provides a substantial essay on the most important Functional programming language, Prolog. The contributions are designed to enable the programmer to evaluate the languages and to understand the ways in which each works.* Bob Chassell on Emacs LISP,* Brian Harvey on Scheme,* Jim Blandy on Guile,* Jim Veitch on CLOS,* Jamie Andrews on Prolog.<UL><LI>Unique leaders in the field of functional, concurrent and logic programming provide insightful information about the language that they helped to create</LI><LI>A complete handbook covering the most widely used functional, concurrent and logic programming languages</LI><LI>Comprehensive coverage of each language includes history, syntax, variables, tips and traps</LI><LI>Unique introductory material enables professional programmers to evaluate whether a specific language is appropriate for his or her use</LI></UL>