Programming Languages ITU F2004

Latest news

• June 9: The exam questions: June 2004 with solutions
• May 25: A Q-and-A session (`spørgetime') will be organized Friday 4 June at 9h-10h in the usual room 0.15.
• May 25: Pensum til skriftlig eksamen:
  • Torben Mogensen: Basics of Compiler Design (DIKU, University of Copenhagen, June 2003), afsnit 2.1-2.5, 2.9, 3.1-3.6, 3.16.
  • Peter Sestoft: Programming Language Concepts, 2004. Also the SML Appendix.
  • Kernighan and Ritchie: The C Programming Language, sections 5.1-5.5.
  • Moscow ML Owner's Manual, especially the descriptions of mosmllex and mosmlyac.
  • Lecture slides for lectures 1-12 plus those exercises in exercise sheets 1-10 that you were asked to hand in.

Course information

Plan

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

When and where

We meet Wednesdays at ITU Glentevej, starting Wednesday 4 February and ending Wednesday 28 April.

Course format

There will be lectures in the morning (9h-12h in room 0.15) and exercises in the afternoon (13h-16h in room 4.05 --- NB: changed from 4.04). The weekly exercises require implementation of programming language concepts. The exercises are voluntary, but it is practically impossible to pass the course without doing them.

Teachers

• Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk); lectures mostly.
• Andrzej Wasowski (wasowski@itu.dk); exercises mostly.

Teaching language

All course materials are in English and lectures will be given in English (unless everybody understands Danish well).

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 a Standard ML crash course, using Appendix A from Programming Language Concepts (see below). Reference material on the Standard ML libraries is available from on the Moscow ML homepage. For supplementary reading, a good beginners' book is Hansen and Rischel's Introduction to Programming Using SML. You can get it at Naturfagsbogladen, Universitetsparken 13 (the first floor of the August Krogh Institute); but they charge 640 kroner.
• We shall use the Moscow ML implementation and the associated tools mosmllex and mosmlyac, described in the Owner's Manual.
• Torben Mogensen's lecture notes Basics of Compiler Design (DIKU 2003) are used to present the concepts of lexing and parsing. We also need some research papers etc, all bound into one volume that can be bought at ITU office 2.20.
• Peter Sestoft's lecture notes Programming Language Concepts (PLC), KVL and ITU 2004, are used to present concepts of abstract syntax, dynamic and static semantics, interpreters, virtual machines, compilers, compilation, byte code, reflection, and runtime code generation. These notes will be handed out in class a few chapters at a time, and will be available electronically after the course.
  Here is the April 2004 version of these notes, including all chapters handed out during the course.
• 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 a Standard ML 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 Standard ML, which is quite different from Java. Secondly, and mostly, by creating implementations of other kinds of programming languages: imperative (C style), functional (Standard ML-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 Standard ML early on; this requires solving the weekly exercises.

Official course description

Here is the official course description.

Exam

There is a written examination on Wednesday 9 June 2004 from 9h00 to 13h00 (check with the course database!) with books etc. but without computers.

Old exam questions:

• June 2004 with solutions
• June 2003 with solutions
• June 2002 with solutions
• Trial exam questions

Last year's course homepage

Here is last year's course homepage.

Additional literature

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

Projects

Here is a list of project proposals. It makes eminent 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 PFOOF2004_stud@itu.dk; please cc: to carstenj@itu.dk, sestoft@dina.kvl.dk, wasowski@itu.dk.

Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk) 2004-01-23