Programming Language Preliminary Exam Syllabus

Updated 9/28/2001

This document summarizes the material that students taking the programming language preliminary exam should know. This document should not be taken as an exhaustive description of the material, but instead as a set of guidelines that are intended to be helpful to students studying for the exam.

Students are expected to have an understanding of key concepts underlying languages such as: Algol-60, Fortran, Lisp, Pascal, Ada, C, Smalltalk, C++, Java, Modula-3, Prolog, Scheme, S ML, and some assembly language. In addition, you should be able to:

• Formally describe the structure of programs using appropriate notation
• Reason about programs, using logic to determine correctness without resorting to massive testing
• Express the semantics of a programming language in terms of machine operations and storage
• Take advantage of special cases in the source program to improve the efficiency of the resulting target program

Books that may be helpful when studying for the programming languages preliminary exam are: Ghezzi and Jazayeri (Programming Language Concepts),  Tennent (Principles of programming languages), Gries (The science of programming), and Appel (Modern compiler implementation in Java).   Copies of these books are on reserve in the library (they may be under either CSCI 3155, CSCI 5535, or ECEN 4553).

The combined table of contents of the Ghezzi and Appel books make up the list of topics that we will expect you to know.  Note, however, that you may need to use several sources in order to get a good coverage of some topics.

This page maintained by Amer Diwan