Programming Languages ITU F2005

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 29: The exam questions: June 2005 with solutions
March 22: On April 6, there will be a guest lecture in the morning by Kasper Østerbye about Beta, an object-oriented language very different from Java and C#. Kasper is associate professor at the ITU and co-developer of Beta.
There will be no exercises in the afternoon of April 6 because both Andrzej and Peter are in Edinburgh that day.

Course information

Plan

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

When and where

We meet Wednesdays at ITU (Rued Langgaardsvej 7, 2300 København S), starting Wednesday 2 February and ending Wednesday 27 April. Lectures are held in 4A14 (NB: Change) and exercises are held in 4A54.

Course format

There will be lectures in the morning (9h-12h) and exercises in the afternoon (13h-16h). 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 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 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.
We shall use the Moscow ML implementation and the associated tools mosmllex and mosmlyac, described in the Owner's Manual.
Most of the reading material for the course will be printed and sold in one volume, including:
- Torben Mogensen's lecture notes Basics of Compiler Design (DIKU 2004) which are used to present the concepts of lexing and parsing.
- Peter Sestoft's lecture notes Programming Language Concepts (PLC), KVL and ITU 2005, which are used to present concepts of abstract syntax, dynamic and static semantics, interpreters, virtual machines, compilers, compilation, byte code, reflection, and runtime code generation.
  Here is the January 2005 version of these notes (included also in the lecture notes).
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

See the Intranet.

Exam

There is a written examination on Wednesday 29 June 2005 (it is your responsibility to check with the course database!) with books etc. but without computers.

Old exam questions: June 2005 with solutions 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.

Peter Sestoft (sestoft@dina.kvl.dk) 2005-01-11