CS 144

Programming Languages
Syllabus , Winter 2007

           athena.union.edu/~hemmendd/Courses/cs370

Prof. Hemmendinger                      hemmendd[@union.edu]
221 Steinmetz                           Hours: MW 12:30-2:30
388-6319                                  and by appointment

Specific topics: Data abstraction; basic ADTs such as stacks, queues; recursively defined datatypes such as binary and general trees; recursive subprograms; understanding of program design and testing methods, and of program documentation standards.

General: Ability independently to design, write, debug, and test a C++ or Java program of the size assigned in CS 77. Ability to use Unix systems, including editors and compilers, and to get information from man-pages and other sources to answer questions that arise during their use.

Specific topics: Basic set concepts; functions as mappings between sets, cartesian products; propositional and elementary predicate logic; proof methods, especially mathematical induction.

The assignments in this course are intended to help you to think about programming language design and implementation. All of the work that you turn in for grading must be your own. If you discuss the homework with others, what you write up and turn in must still be done entirely on your own. The programming assignments will not be appropriate for group work. If two or more people turn in the same homework or programs, they will receive grades of 0 for that work, and further joint work will lead to their being dropped from the course. If you are uncertain about what constitutes undue cooperation, please discuss it with me. Please also review the college policy on academic honesty.

Printed copies of projects and homework are due at the start of the class on the specified date. Homework turned in after the start of class on the due date but before the start of the next class will receive half-credit, but after that time, no credit, since solutions will be available then. Late projects will be subject to a 10% penalty per calendar day.

All programs, including homework, must be properly documented and be formatted according to standard indentation practices. Be sure that there are no long lines that are wrapped or truncated (this means that you’ll have to insert carriage-returns rather than rely on a word-processor to format lines). Use only a constant-width font (Courier, typewriter) for programs. Programs that don’t meet these requirements will be marked as late and returned for resubmission.

The grade scale will be no stricter than A: ≥90,B: 80−89.9, C: 70−79.9,D: 60−69.9,F: <60.

You should plan to spend about 10 hours of work per week on this course outside class.

The course will use Standard ML for programming during the first half of the term. During the second half we shall use other languages (Scheme, Prolog, ...) for some assignments. The Olin 110 CS lab (Windows and Linux) and Pasta lab (Linux) have Standard ML of New Jersey (SML/NJ) (sml), which is also available for for downloading to PCs (IBM and Apple). The Pasta lab has GNU prolog (gprolog); information on other languages will come later. The Linux systems have the usual editors, emacs, vi, pico, kedit.

The public directory for the course is antipasto:/home/csc370pub. It contains or will contain homework solutions, lecture notes, examples from the text, and other programming examples.

To benefit from the texts, you’ll need to read them before class discussion. Read chapters 1-6 of the ML book or the "Gentle introduction to ML that’s on the Web as soon as possible, so that you can use them as references for the program assignments. Further readings will be recommended later.

Week of                Topic                Readings (Tucker and Noonan)   homework due (Wednesdays)
Jan. 3    PL background; intro to FP        ch 1
Jan. 8    syntax, more FP                   ch 2, 3.1-3.2                  hw 1
Jan. 15   names                             ch 4                           hw 2
Jan. 22   types, type systems               ch 5-6                         hw 3
Jan. 29   semantics                         ch 7.1-7.5, 7.7                hw 4; project 1 (Mon.))
Feb 5     semantic interpretation           ch 8
Feb. 5    midterm
Feb. 12   semantics, functions              ch 9                           hw 5
Feb. 19   ADTs, object-oriented languages   ch 11.1-11.2,12.1, 13.1-13.3   hw 6, project 2 (Fri.)
Feb. 26   other functional languages        ch 14                          hw 7
Mar. 5    logic programming                 ch 15                          hw 8
Mar.12    TBA                               project 3 (Mon)