University of Miami, Department of Computer Science

CSC519 - Programming Languages

There is a bewildering array of programming languages in current use, and an even larger collection of dead or nearly dead languages. In this course we will discuss what they have in common, what sets them appart, and how they work.

Prerequisites

CSC517. Students who do not meet the prerequisites must tell the instructor.

Office Hours and Lab time

The course will be taught by Dr. Stephan Schulz. My office hours are Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 13:00 to 14:30, or by email appointment.

To remotely log onto the Lab machines, use an ssh client (ssh under UNIX/Linux, Putty should work under Windows) and connect to lee.cs.miami.edu (students.cs.miami.edu does not work anymore). To change your password, use yppasswd. Please also check the password policy page.

Course Material Online

Assignments and lecture notes (updated Fri Dec 6 12:09:33 EST 2002 -- final update (modulo typos)) are on the web. Lecture notes should be available on the evening before any given class.

Other material (Note: Some of this temporarily unavailable. Email me, if you neef a copy):

The source handler for PL (20/9/2002). Download it, then run gtar -xzvf PL_STEP1.tgz to unpack it. Read PL_STEP1/README for more information. You might need to run make depend before running plain make. To run the test program, type ./sh_test filename (for some existing file name).
The PL Scanner. Again, unpack, cd into the directory, then run make depend;make.
The PL Parser. To use, follow the scanner instructions above.
Here are some PL programs for testing your compiler:
- Thanks to Andrew for providing us with a largish PL program that actually does something interesting (computing square roots). I've only fiddled the syntax (Andrews compiler is more generous than mine). Use it as a test case for your compiler! As far as I can tell, it works fine for actual square numbers, but does nothing useful for non-squares.
- Here is a very short PL program for testing: double.plp. It accepts a single argument and doubles it.
- My take at a square root program computes the square root of any number (rounded down to the next integer for non-squares). If it looks suspiciously regular, that's because I used the C preprocessor to generate it from this source.

Classes

Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 3:00 to 3:50 p.m., MM205

Assessment

5% Initial essay
25% Programming assignments
10% Midterm exam
10% Web page assignment
50% Final exam

To recieve a particular grade, you may have to qualify for it in each individual category.

Some topics

An overview over programming languages
Language classification
Language implementation
Programming paradigms
- Imperativ/procedural
- Object-oriented
- Functional
- Declarative/Logic

Suggested literature

Books (Dead Trees)

The course uses Programming Languages: Concepts and Constructs, 2nd Ed. by Ravi Sethi. You are strongly encouraged to have a copy of the book at hand.

Online Resources

Note: Do not post any homework questions to any newsgroups! The regulars don't like it. I don't like it. If you have any specialized questions that you cannot answer after your own research, asking either me or a newsgroup is fine.

You can try any language-specific newsgroup. We will at least discuss C, Scheme and Prolog, and probably either Python or C++ for an example of an object-oriented language.
Try Google if you need to find something specific.