PL-Detective: A system for teaching programming language concepts

Click here to get a paper describing the PL-Detective (35th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2004) and click here to get a paper evaluating the PL-Detective (36th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, 2005).  The PL-Detective was developed by Amer Diwan, William Waite, and Michele Jackson at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

The PL-Detective is available under the GNU Public Licence.  To see examples of exercises that use the PL-Detective, visit our class web page for CSCI 3155 (Principles of Programming Languages). 

Binary Downloads (recommended)

• 15th April 2004 (Better line numbers in error messages over version of 9th April 2004)
• 8th June 2004
  • Added new dimensions for array subscripts and operands of built-in operators
  • Separated out the dimension on assignment and parameter compatibility into two dimensions
  • Fixed a bug that resulted in poor error messages in some cases
  • Changed the web pages so that the syntax pops up in a new window
  • Changed the model for passing the "script" so that now rather than passing an encrypted script, it just passes the name of a file on the PLDetective machine that contains the script.  Much safer and less cumbersome than the "obfuscate.py" solution.
  • The jar files now contain the source and thus, both binary and source are now being distributed together
• 4th August 2004
  • Changed syntax of MYSTERY in several ways.  Notably the program is now a block which means that there is no "main" routine.  The body of the program block is the main body.  Also, return types for procedures are now optional.
  • Moved users.txt and scrips to a configuration directory for security reasons.
  • Fixed various little bugs that I've forgotten about ;-)
• LATEST VERSION
  17th September 2004
  • Fixed a parser bug related to procedures that do not return anything (an addition in the previous release).

Source Downloads

• 15th April 2004 PLDetective, PLDetectiveRT
• Starting with June 2004, I'm including the source in the jar files distributed as the binary download.