Principles of Programming Languages
CSCI 3135

Administrivia

Course goals

• This course will cover important concepts behind modern programming languages such as Java and ML.  After taking this course, you will be able to:
• Understand better the strengths and limitations of languages you use already;
• Teach yourself new languages with relative ease;
• Evaluate the suitability of a language for a given task.

Course requirements

Projects	45%
Quizzes	25%
Question on reading	10%
Final exam	20%

All assignments in this course will be structured as part of three projects.  Each project will have three parts, where each part will be some combination of implementation, answering homework style questions, and discussion.  The projects are designed to give students experience with language design, implementation, and use.

For every reading, each student needs to submit a question or comment on the reading before the class in which the reading will first be discussed.  The question must be submitted using PEP.  Questions/comments should be specific: e.g., asking "I didn't understand the reading, can you explain it?" is not acceptable. We will answer these questions electronically.  These questions make up 10% of your grade.

Recitations

There will be one recitation per week.  There will be a 20-minute quiz every alternate recitation.  These quizzes will make up 25% of your grade.  The first quiz will be on January 25th.

Important dates

The due dates for different stages of each project are as follows.  Unless otherwise indicated, all assignments are due by 5:00 p.m..  No extensions will be granted.
 

	Project assigned	Stage 0	Stage 1	Discussion	Stage 2
Project 1	18th January	30th January	February 8th	February 13th	February 20th
Project 2	February 20th	March 8th and March 22nd	April 10th	April 10th	April 17th
Project 3	April 17th	April 24th		April 24th	May 1st

The quizzes will be held on the following dates.  All students must take quizzes at their scheduled time.
 

January 25th

February 8th

February 22nd

March 8th

April 5th

April 19th

Project announcements

• To get some test cases for the Stage 1/Project 1, go to ~csci3155/proj1-tests
• INTERFACE FOR PROJECT 1: Your program when run should take two arguments: the input file name, and the output file name.  Thus, it should run as: java Main infile outfile
• SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: To submit your code for stage 1 or later, create a directory that contains all your code.  Let's call this directory D.  In this directory you should put a text file called README in which you need to put your full name and also the command lines you use to compile and run your submission.  Now cd to the directory that contains the directory D.  In this directory do a "tar -cf myusername.tar D".   You should substitute your username for myusername (note that username is the name you use to log into the undergrad machines and is not necessarily the same as your PEP username).  The tar command will create a tar file called myusername.tar.  Now execute the following command:

     ~csci3155/bin/submitproj myusername.tar
In a few minutes you should automatically receive an email message indicating that your submission was received.  If you don't receive this message in 30 minutes, please send us email.
• SOME THOUGHTS ON TESTING

Grading of projects

We will use a straightforward approach to grading programming projects.  For each programming exercise, we will provide a number of test inputs.  In addition, for our grading, we will have a number of grading inputs, which we will not reveal until all submissions have been graded.
• How many of the test inputs does your solution handle correctly (40 points)
• How many of the grading inputs does your solution handle correctly (40 points)

The quality of your code (comments, structure, etc.)

Plaigarism policy

While we encourage you to work together in learning the material, all work you submit must be your own.  Students caught plaigarizing will immediately receive an F in the class.  Also note that we will use a grading curve to assign grades: assisting other students (for instance, by passing on quiz questions to students in a later recitation section) will effectively lower your own grade in the class.  If you include any text, code, or figure from any source in your submitted work you must clearly indicate it in your submission and include a citation to the original source.

Texts

The main text for this course is Programming Language Pragmatics by Michael Scott.  Other texts that may be useful to you (but are entirely optional) includeConcepts of Programming Langauges 4th Edition by Robert W. Sebesta and Programming Language Concepts 3rd Edition by Carlo Ghezzi.  These additional texts are also on reserve in the library.
In addition, you will need a book on programming in Java.  The bookstore and library has copies of Just Java 2 by Peter van der Linden.

Mailing list

To join the class discussion list, send mail to majordomo@cs.colorado.edu, with the following as the body of your message:
  subscribe csci3155 <your email address>
Feel free to post any relevant question/opinions to this mailing list by sending mail to: csci3155@cs.colorado.edu

List of topics

The following table gives the topics we will cover in the class and the approximate number of lectures to be spent on each topic.  The "Reading" column lists the reading material for the class. You should do the reading for a class before attending the class.
 
 

Approximate number of lectures	Topic and slides	Reading
1	Introduction (slides in pdf)	Chapter 1
2	Programming language syntax (slides in pdf)	Sections 2.1, 2.2 (excl. 2.2.4, "Locally least-cost error recovery", and 2.2.6)
2	Names, scopes and bindings (slides in pdf)	Sections 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.5, 3.6
1	Semantic analysis (slides in pdf)	Chapter 4 (excl. 4.5, 4.6)
2	Control flow (slides in pdf)	Chapter 6 (excl. 6.5.3 and 6.7)
2	Subroutines and control abstraction(slides  in pdf, updated)	Sections 8.1, 8.2, 8.3.  ALSO  "How the parameters got their modes" from handout "How the language got its spots"
2	Implementation of subroutines incl. closures (slides in pdf)	Sections 3.2 and  3.4
2	Intro to types (slides in pdf)	Sections 7.1, 7.3.1, 7.3.2, 7.3.4 (except "variants in ada"), 7.4.1, 7.4.2, 7.5, 7.6
2	Type equality, subtyping, information hiding.  (slides in pdf)	Section 7.2 excl 7.2.4, ALSO "How the types got their identity" from "How the language got its spots"
2	Case studies of types: Modula-3 (slides in pdf)	Modula-3 language definition, Section 2.2
3	Object orientation: basic concepts (slides in pdf)	Sections 10.1, 10.2, 10.4.1
2	Object orientation case study: Java (slides in pdf)	Read up on objects and class in Java in your favorite text
4	Functional programming languages (slides in pdf)	Scott 11.1, 11.2 (until page 598), 11.2.3. Scott 7.2.4, 7.2.5
2	Exception handling (slides in pdf)	Section 8.5
1	Garbage collection

Exams

quiz 1
quiz 2
quiz 3
quiz 4
quiz 5
quiz 6

Interesting links

 C++ language definition
 Modula-3 language definition
 Using opaque types for Modula-3 I/O library
 Java language definition
 Full SML tutorial
 Ada reference manual
Eiffel