News

All homework assignments are online now.

Textbooks

Required Books

• Andrew Appel. Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Cambridge University Press 1998, reprinted with corrections, 1999.
• Jeffery Ullman. Elements of ML Programming (ML97 Edition). Prentice-Hall 1998

Optional Books (on reserve at the Becton Library)

• Alfred Aho, Ravi Sethi, Jeffery Ullman. Compilers, Principles, Techniques and Tools. Addison Wesley 1986.
• L.C. Paulson. ML for the Working Programmer, 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Grades

• programming assignments: 70%
• problem sets and exams: 30%

Attendence

Assignments

For each programming assignment, you must turn in two things: the code, and a writeup describing what you did and why, and how you tested your program. The writeup is an important part of your work and will contribute significantly to your assignment grade.

Late-Assignments Policy

Each student is given 100 discretionary late hours for programming assignments, but any one assignment may only be up to 72 hours late (this is because we will post the sample solution after then). These are calendar hours, not business hours. As the homework assignments are submitted electronically, the "write date" on the student's homework file will be considered the completion date for late assignments.

After you use up all of your discretionary late hours, assignments turned in late will be graded according to the following formula: S = R * (1 - t / c), where S is the grade given, R is the grade the work would have gotten if turned in on time, t is the amount of time by which the work was late, and c is equal to four days. Thus, the value of a late assignment decays daily, with a half-life of just over two days. Examples: work turned in five minutes late gets 99.9% credit, one hour late gets 99.0% credit, six hours late gets 93.8% credit, one day late gets 75.0% credit, two days late gets 50.0%, and three days late gets 25.0%. Assignments submitted more than 72 hours late will not be accepted.

There will be no extensions due to scheduling conflicts, computer downtime, or other such factors, except under truly extraordinary circumstances. Extensions will be granted only for university-sanctioned excuses such as illness, and then only with the proper documentation. You are responsible for planning ahead and managing your time so that you can complete the assignments on time. You must either finish on time or accept the consequences of doing otherwise.

Collaboration Policy

Do not, under any circumstances, copy another person's program. Writing code for use by another or using another's code in any form violates the University's academic regulations and will be dealt with harshly.

How to Submit Programming Assignments

To submit your solutions to the programming assignments electronically, first change to the directory where your solutions are, and then use the following command.

 /c/cs421/bin/submit number files

 /c/cs421/bin/submit 3 README sources.cm tiger.lex

The submit command copies your files to the directory /c/cs421/SUBMIT/number/login and lists all the files that you have submitted for assignment number. Here, login is your user account name.

There is also unsubmit, which allows you to retract one or more files. For example,

 /c/cs421/bin/unsubmit 3 tiger.lex

You can also check what files you have submitted by using the check command. For example,

 /c/cs421/bin/check 3

Usually, you can omit the /c/cs421/bin/ prefix if /c/cs421/bin/ is already added to your PATH variable.

Keeping In Touch

All the course-related information will be kept at the following World Wide Web site:

 http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs421

You can access this home page by using netscape; just type

 netscape http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs421

 lynx http://zoo.cs.yale.edu/classes/cs421

You can use netscape to browse yale.cs.cs421, or you can use rn to read unread news. To view unread articles in yale.cs.cs421 using rn, just type "rn yale.cs.cs421".

"man rn" will display the (very long) man page for rn. (The first time you use rn, it will display a brief introduction to its use.)

If you add the line "rn -c yale.cs.cs421" to your .login file, you'll be advised of unread articles in yale.cs.cs421 every time you log in.

You are invited to post articles to yale.cs.cs421 if you have something to tell the class. To post an article, just mail it to cs421@cs.

Office Hours

• Carsten Schürmann: Monday 2:30-3:30, Wednesday 2:30-3:30
• Adam Poswolsky:
• or by appointment.