Advanced Topics in Programming Languages

(Fall 1998) Advanced Topics in Programming Languages

Assignments

• Assignment 1: Due Tue 22 Dec 98.
• Assignment 2: Due Tue 05 Jan 99.
• Assignment 3: Due Wed 17 Feb 99.

• Update to Chapter 6 of "Essentials of Programming Languages"
• Chapter 13 of "Essentials of Programming Languages" on "Type Inference"
• Threads in SCM (with same fringe)
• Same fringe using threads in C
• Notes on multithreading in C (Part 1) (postscript)
• Notes on multithreading in C (Part 2) (postscript)
• Online supplement to the book Concurrent Programming in Java by Doug Lea

Lecture Notes

• Week 1: Scheme - quick review: recursion, syntactic abstraction. Syntactic description with BNF, Deriving Programs from BNF specifications.
• Week 2: lambda calculus - Free variables vs. bound variables. beta reduction.
• Week 3: alpha reduction. Variable renaming. eta conversion. Reduction strategies. Applicative order. Church-Rosser Theorem.
• Week 4: Recursion in $\lambda$ calculus and the Y-operator. Approaches to Semantics of Programming Languages: operational, structured operational, denotational semantics. Reasoning about programs, program transformations. Language vs. Meta-language. Expressed values vs. Denoted values.
• Week 5: Interpreters: base interpreter. Adding conditionals. Local bindings. Procedures. Variable assignment. (Simple) recursion. Dynamic scope vs. static scope.