Programming Languages IT-C F2002

This course introduces programming language concepts and tools, such as interpreters, compilers, grammars, parsers, parser generators, abstract machines, type checking, etc. We shall model imperative, functional, and object-oriented programming languages by means of interpreters and simple compilers.

Latest news

June 19: Here are the real exam questions.
June 7: At long last, some trial exam questions have been posted.
June 6: Spørgetime (last questions before the exam) will be held June 14 from 11.00 to 12.00 in room 0.15.
May 24: Pensum til skriftlig eksamen:
- Torben Mogensen: Basics of Compiler Design (DIKU, University of Copenhagen, June 2001), afsnit 2.1-2.5, 3.1-3.5, 3.15.
- Forelæssningsplancherne for forelæsning 1-12, noterne notes01.txt til notes12.txt, samt de opgaver på opgaveark 1-11 som ifølge opgavearkene skal afleveres.
- Moscow ML Owner's Manual, især beskrivelsen af mosmllex og mosmlyac.
- Hansen og Rischel, Introduction to Programming Using SML, Addison-Wesley 1999, kapitel 1, 2, 3, 5, afsnit 7.1--7.5, afsnit 8.1, 8.3, 8.4, kapitel 9.

Course information

Plan

Lecture plan with links to lecture notes, slides, etc.

When and where

We meet Wednesdays at IT-C Glentevej, starting Wednesday 6 February and ending Wednesday 1 May.

Course format

There will be exercises in the morning (9h-12h in room 3.19, with overflow to 3.15 if necessary) and lectures in the afternoon (13h-16h in room 2.59). The weekly exercises require implementation of programming language concepts.

Teachers

Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk); lectures mostly.
Andrzej Wasowski (wasowski@it-c.dk); exercises mostly.

Teaching language

All course materials are in English but the lectures will be given in Danish (unless there is a strong demand to the contrary).

Programming language

We shall use Standard ML (SML) as a meta-language: the language we use to describe other languages, and the language in which we implement interpreters and compilers.

Course materials

We start with an SML crash course. A good beginners' book is Hansen and Rischel's Introduction to Programming Using SML.
We shall use the Moscow ML implementation and the associated tools mosmllex and mosmlyac, described in the Owner's Manual.
To present the concepts of lexing and parsing we shall use Torben Mogensen's Basics of Compiler Design (June 2001). Copies will be handed out.
To present concepts of abstract syntax, dynamic and static semantics, interpreters, virtual machines, compilers, compilation, byte code etc we shall use lecture notes mostly.
To generate Java Virtual Machine code, we shall use Peter Bertelsen's SML-JVM Toolkit.
Here's a packaging of the Emacs 20.7 editor for MS Windows NT/2000/XP that includes SML mode. Unzip to C:\emacs-20.7 and copy C:\emacs-20.7\.emacs to C:\.emacs for proper setup. Emacs is included with all Linux distributions.
A configuration file sml.syn for Standard ML syntax highlighting in the JCreator Pro editor. Here are the installation instructions.

Form

We shall study programming language concepts in two ways. First, by learning SML, which is quite different from Java. Secondly, and mostly, by creating implementations of other kinds of programming languages: imperative (C style), functional (SML-style), and object-oriented (Java-style). That way we learn the concepts of those languages and how they are implemented on the computer.

Warning

It is very hard to follow the remainder of the course if you do not get a good grasp of SML early on; this requires solving the weekly exercises.

Official course description

Although the description in the official course database recommended a textbook by Friedman, Haynes, and Wand, I have come to the conclusion that it is not really well-suited for our purpose. The meta-language used in that book, called Scheme, introduces a number of artificial complications. If you can deal with those complications, it is an interesting book to learn from.

Exam

There is a written examination on Wednesday 19 June 2002 (better check with the course database) with books etc. but without computers.

Additional literature

Here are a few pointers to the literature on compilers and interpreters.

Projects

Here is a list of project proposals. It would make good sense to do a four-week project following the course.

Participants

The list of participants
There is a course newsgroup.
The course mailing list is PFOOF2002_stud@it-c.dk; please cc: to sestoft@dina.kvl.dk and wasowski@it-c.dk.

Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk) 2002-01-07, 2002-02-25