Index of this document

• Contact information
• Tutorials
• Course outline
• Calendar of important course-related events
• Evaluation and related policies
• Announcements
• Handouts
• Old exams

Contact information

Email with MIME-encoded or HTML message bodies will not be read nor responded to.

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Tutorials

A bulletin board has also been created for the class, which will be monitored by the TAs.

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Course outline

• (2 weeks) Formal Specification of Programming Languages
• (4 weeks) Functional Programming: ML
• (3 weeks) Logic Programming: Prolog
• (3 weeks) Design Principles for Programming Languages
• (1 week) Review

We will be using SML of New Jersey, and SWI Prolog.

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Calendar of important course-related events

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Evaluation and related policies

Important note on final: You must pass the final  to pass the course.   In other words, if you receive below a 50% (after curve) on the final exam, you automatically fail the course, regardless of your performance on homeworks and the midterms.

Important note on homeworks: Homeworks will be distributed electronically,  and collected  either in tutorial or by appointment with the TA for the homework in question.   They will also be returned in tutorial.

Lateness Policy: No late homeworks will be accepted without a signed medical certificate.  With a signed medical certificate, a late outstanding assignment may be ``cancelled'' at the instructor's discretion, in which case the marks for that piece of work will be distributed over the other marked work for the course in weighted proportion to the other work's contribution to the course grade.  A missed midterm will be cancelled, but again only with a signed medical certificate.

Silent policy:  The TA is not obliged to answer questions posed  less than 24 hours before any assignment is due, and is not obliged to answer questions already answered on the newsgroup at any time.  Students are encouraged to use the bulletin board for the course to pose their questions.

Remarking: Homeworks or exams written in pencil or erasable ink will not be remarked.  A request for remarking should be directed to the tutor who marked the assignment.  The tutor is only required to remark once - if you still believe your solution is correct, you may appeal to the instructor.

Policy on collaboration: Collaboration on homeworks and copying from others' homeworks are strictly prohibited - you are permitted to speak only with your tutors and the instructor about the homework.  If challenged by either a tutor or the instructor, you must be able to reproduce and explain any solution you submit in an oral exam.  Failure to observe this policy is an academic offense, carrying a penalty ranging from a zero on the homework to suspension from the university.

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Announcements

• 6 December: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 12: compilers, call stacks, activation trees, structured programming, modularity.
  
• 29 November: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 11: cut, shallow cut, levels of programming languages.
  
• 22 November: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 10: meta-logical predicates, recursion and the order of clauses in Prolog, backtracking, negation-as-failure, dynamic predicates.
  
• 15 November: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 9: unification, anonymous variables, arithmetic predicates, non-monotonicity.
  
• 8 November: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 8: complex formulae in Prolog, programs vs. queries, Horn clauses.
  
• 1 November: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 7: infix operator declarations, introduction to Prolog.
  
• 18 October: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 6: auxiliary functions, exceptions and exception handling, scope.
  
• 12 October: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 5: patterns, benefits of typing, record types, type synonyms,  function polymorphism, type definitions, variant types.
• 4 October: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 4:  printing as a side effect, statement sequences, the map and app functions, local variables, message passing in functional programming languages, special kinds of recursive programs.
• 27 September: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 3: predicates, values and evaluation, pure functional programming, lambda terms, higher-order functions, side effects and references.
• 20 September: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 2: context-free languages, typing and basic data types of the ML programming language.
• 13 September: MATERIAL COVERED IN LECTURE 1:  introduction, properties of good programming languages, context-free grammars, derivability.
• 6 September :  Please note that the first tutorial is on Thursday, 20 September (before the second lecture).
• 6 September: PREREQUISITES. To take this course you must (1) have successfully completed CSC 207/270 and CSC 236/238/240 or (2) have the permission of the instructor.  You must also either have a CGPA of at least 3.0 or be enrolled in a CSC subject POSt. Note that the University's automatic registration system does not check for prerequisites: even if you have registered into the course, you will not receive credit for it unless you had satisfied the prerequisite by the time you registered. Transfer students and students awaiting rulings on cases of academic misconduct should take special note of this.

Handouts

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• Lecture 12
  
• Lecture 11/12
  
• Lecture 11
  
• Assignment 4
  
• Lecture 10
  
• Lecture 9
  
• Lecture 8
  
• Assignment 3 - here is the definition of append.
  
• Lecture 7
  
• Lecture 6
  
• Lecture 5
• Assignment 2 - here are some type declarations that you'll need, and some code, and then some more code to test your code with. Solutions
  
• Lecture 4
• Assignment 1 - here is some code that you'll need.  Solutions
• Lecture 3
• Lecture 2
• Lecture 1
• Course information
• A neat, though difficult-to-read graphical history of programming languages

Old exams

• Fall 2003 midterm
• Fall 2003 final
• Fall 2004 midterm

Gerald Penn, 7 December, 2007
This web-page was adapted from the web-page for another course, created by Vassos Hadzilacos.