Programming language design and analysis

Fall semester 2014/2015. previous: Fall 2013
Instructor: Marius Minea, marius@cs.upt.ro
Labs: Loránd Szakács

Course information

Lectures: Mon 18-20h, A 204
Lab: Tue 8-10h, B528
Office hours: on request

Evaluation:
Homeworks / lab / projects: 50%.
Exam: 50%
homework grades
exam grades

Lecture notes

1. Introduction. Functional Programming.
2. Lambda Calculus
   Readings: Lambda calculus (course notes, Jeff Foster)
   Principles of Programming Languages, Uday Reddy, U. Birmingham (handouts 1-4)
3. Type systems.
   Readings: Luca Cardelli: Type Systems (p.1-7)
   L. Cardelli, P. Wegner. On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism (sec. 1-1.5, 2.1-2.2)
4. Typed lambda calculus and type inference. lecture slides by Jeff Foster, U. of Maryland (slides 1-17, 37-48, 58-63)
5. Eager and lazy evaluation. sieve of Eratosthenes. See also streams as delayed lists (from Abelson and Sussman)
   Continuations. slides, TU Darmstadt (w/o simulation of web programs, implementation of continuations) ML example for factorial
6. Garbage collection. slides by Vladimir Shmatikov, U. Texas, Ina Schaefer, U. Kaiserslautern
7. The Java virtual machine slides from Aarhus University
8. Dynamic compilation slides by Michael Hind (IBM) (w/o details of particular JVMs for sec. 3 and 4)
9. Language support for concurrency.
   Mechanisms for mutual exclusion
   Concurrency in other languages (I. Stark, Edinburgh)
   Synchronization without locks (sec. 1 and 2)
10. Logic programming. Prolog basics
    Constraint logic programming. slides by Thom Frühwirth (terms, unification, resolution, comparison between LP and CLP, p. 107-123, 129-135)
    further reading: CLP in ECLiPSE (esp. Ch. 4)
11. Ownership types (presentation by Loránd Szakács)
12. Discussion on programming language design/adoption.
    Stefik/Hanenberg: Programming Language Wars presentation
    Meyerovich/Rabkin: Programming Language Adoption sociological principles, empirical analysis

Labs

• Week 1
• Week 2
• Week 3
• Week 4
• Week 7-8

Homework

1. Homework 1
2. Homework 2
3. Homework 3

Resources

Books

• Abelson and Sussman, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. The classic introductory programming course at MIT, now online.
  You should be able to use it as reference for the notions in the first three chapters
• Friedmann, Wand and Haynes, Essentials of Programming Languages.
  Perhaps more heavily interpreter-oriented, but also very well explained. Available in the free ebook library
• van Roy and Haridi, Concepts, Techniques and Models of Computer Programming.
  Well structured and very readable. An essentially complete draft is available.
• S. Krishnamurthi, Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation. Made available for free by the author.
  Also very well structured and readable, with a few special topics (see e.g. continuations for web programming)

Online Courses

Software

• the OCaml implementation and documentation
• the OCaIDE development environment (Eclipse plugin)
• a short introductio to OCaml (Scott Smith, Johns Hopkins U.)