Programming Language Seminar (SPLG)

Programming Language Seminar (SPLG), Fall 2011

News

23 January 2012: We've agreed on final grades. The grade distribution is: 1x4 + 3x7 + 2x10 + 1x12.
21 November 2011: Here's a local copy of the postage table referred from miniproject 4 question 9.
15 November 2011: The literature for tomorrow's lecture and some code to experiment with in the miniproject has been uploaded. Miniproject 4 will appear soon; its hand-in date is 30 November.
24 October 2011: The hand-in date for miniproject 2 (type checking and type inference) is Wednesday 26 October. Sorry that this hasn't been communicated clearly before.
12 October 2011: Note that the the course blog https://blog.itu.dk/SPLG-E2011/ contains answers to some questions about the type inference miniproject.
2 September 2011: Use the course blog https://blog.itu.dk/SPLG-E2011/ to ask questions concerning the miniprojects. You are also most welcome to answer other students' questions there.
29 August 2011: Course plan updated with topics and some literature.
23 August 2011: The structure and execution of this course will change this term, so that it will consist of four cycles of lecture+project work, followed by a final course report.

Practical and administrative matters

Seminars are held Wednesdays 09:00-12:00 in 3A18
The first seminar is on Wed 31 August at 10:00
The course period is 14 weeks (7.5 ECTS).
This time is structured into four cycles of three weeks each, followed by a two week period for writing a final report. Each three-week cycle is centred on a particular subject and requires students to do a mini-project on that subject.
You can hand in your mini-project solution by sending a zip-file to Peter sestoft@itu.dk containing your source code and a README.TXT or README.PDF file with a brief description: how to compile and run the code, known deficiencies and problems, or features that you are particularly proud of.
The zip file must be named SPLG-Your-Name-4.zip and should unpack to a similarly-named directory.
Even if you collaborate on a mini-project, send separate zip-files but remember to say (in the README.* file) with whom you collaborated.
Peter is available for consultations in office 4C15 or email sestoft@itu.dk; but it's better to use the course blog for questions. Søren is available for consultations in office 4C02, at email debois@itu.dk, or phone 5358 5818.
The official course description.
Last year's course homepage.
Exam: Each student should write an individual short report (say 10 pages). The report must be handed in to the study administration (in three copies) no later than Wednesday 14 December 2011 at 15:00.

Rules

To be determined.
Use Google scholar, ACM Digital Library, Citeseer, the IT-Library in wing 0B, and similar sources when you search for literature.

Literature

Hansen & Rischel: Functional programming with F#, chapters 1 to 5. Draft book manuscript, DTU, 24 August 2011. PDF file will be provided. Do not circulate.
Sestoft: PLCSD: Programming Language Concepts for Software Developers, version 0.51, IT University of Copenhagen, 25 August 2011. Also in a paper-saving two-pages-to-one format. At least chapters 1, 2, A, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14.
Materials on Jolie.
Sestoft: Spreadsheet technology. Draft book manuscript, 288 pages, IT University, November 2011. The reference manual for Funcalc is in Appendix A, on pages 226-244.
Here is the Funcalc implementation as a rough zip of a Visual Studio 2010 (SP1) project. The zip file is 5 MB but the actual source code is just 12,000 lines. The executables Funcalc.exe and two small *.dll files are in SDFCalc/CoreCalc/bin/Release/

Schedule (will be updated)


Week	Date	Topic	Reading and exercises
35	Wed 31 Aug at 10:00	Course overview. Functional programming with F# (PS lecture, SD mini-project). Lecture slides and Miniproject 1: Chess	Hansen and Rischel: Functional programming using F#, chapters 1-5
36	Wed 07 Sep	F# mini-project (SD consultations)
37	Wed 14 Sep	F# mini-project (SD consultations)
38	Wed 21 Sep	Cancelled -- but please start reading the materials for next week!
39	Wed 28 Sep	Type inference for a functional language (TH lecture, PS mini-project). Miniproject 2: Type checking and type inference	Sestoft: PLCSD chapters 1, 2, 5, 6. Damas & Milner: Principal type schemes for functional programs. Example sources: fun1.zip and typedfun.zip and fun2.zip
40	Wed 05 Oct	Type inference mini-project (GP consultations)
41	Wed 12 Oct	Type inference mini-project (GP consultations)
42	Wed 19 Oct	Fall Break
43	Wed 26 Oct	Cancelled
44	Wed 02 Nov	The Jolie language (FM lecture, FM mini-project). Type inference mini-project hand-in. Materials and mini-project from the lecture.
45	Wed 09 Nov	Jolie mini-project (FM consultations)
46	Wed 16 Nov at 09:00	Spreadsheet technology (PS lecture, PS mini-project) Lecture slides and Miniproject 4: Spreadsheet technology	Sestoft: PLCSD chapters 9, 13, 14. Sestoft: Spreadsheet technology (see link above)
47	Wed 23 Nov	Spreadsheet/C# mini-project (PS consultations)
48	Wed 30 Nov	Spreadsheet/C# mini-project hand-in. Final report writing starts (SD consultations)
49	Wed 07 Dec	Report writing (PS+SD consultations)
50	Wed 14 Dec	Report hand-in, before 15:00

Topics for inspiration

For the final report, you can do work in continuation of the four mini-projects, or choose another topic within the theme recent developments in programming languages. For inspiration, here are some example topics:

Scala, http://www.scala-lang.org/, combining functional and object-oriented programming, interesting type system (traits, type members), actors for concurrency, JVM platform
F#, http://fsharp.net, functional programming, dimensions, actors for concurrency, units of measure types (A Kennedy), .NET platform
C# 4.0 and .NET 4.0 (more and more functional, dynamic types, Task Parallel Library, ...)
Plaid (http://www.plaid-lang.org/), Aldrich at CMU, concurrency, typestate, gradual typing
Typed Scheme, http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/samth/typed-scheme/, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, Scheme with gradual typing. Related: soft typing (Cartwright), Soft Scheme (Wright), from Scheme to ML (Henglein, Rehof), Dylan (Mehnert)
Javascript gradual typing (Møller, Thiemann)
BitC, http://www.bitc-lang.org/, Jonathan Shapiro, combining a low-level C-like systems programming language with the safety of strongly typed functional languages. Related work: Cyclone (Morrisett)
Concurrency concepts: actors, transactional memory, futures; for instance, the book Actors in Scala (http://www.artima.com/shop/actors_in_scala), and futures in Racket (a Scheme dialect): http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/futures.html http://docs.racket-lang.org/guide/performance.html#(part._effective-futures)
Programming with Dependent Types, programming in Coq.
LLVM (implementation, virtual machine, used by Apple, by the Mono open source .NET implementation, and in high-performance parallel computing)
Parallel programming for multicore architectures, .NET Task Parallel Library and similar efforts for Java
General-purpose graphics cards (GPGPU) for high-performance computing, Microsoft Accelerator (S Singh), much material from Nvidia and the Lapack working papers.
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA), eg. Scheme Workshop 2006, MS Accelerator.
Just-in-time compiler technology, eg. IBM JVM (Suganuma), Spur tracing JIT (Microsoft, but also Christian Probst at DTU).
The rise of dynamically typed languages (Python, Ruby, Groovy, Clojure, Javascript, ...) at the same time that strong static type systems become more and more powerful (generics in Java and C#, co- and contravariant type parameters in C#, higher-kinded types in Scala, dependent types, typestate). What is good and bad about the two approaches?
Generalized algebraic datatypes in C#. Generalized Algebraic Data Types and Object-Oriented Programming Andrew Kennedy and Claudio Russo. OOPSLA, October 2005 http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/akenn/generics/gadtoop.pdf
Refinement types. Semantic Subtyping with an SMT Solver Gavin M. Bierman, Andrew D. Gordon, Catalin Hritcu, and David Langworthy http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/135577/MSR-TR-2010-99.pdf

On top of that the course will give an overview of possible MSc thesis subjects in this area and offer a possibility of matching students to supervisors.

Final report topics


Name	Title
(name)	(topic)

Teachers

Last update: 2012-01-24