The primary text for the course is:
Benjamin C. Pierce: Types and Programming Languages
Not all of the book will be covered, and other material is used as well, but this book will be necessary to have.
The course aims to deepen understanding on the concepts and features of programming languages, and provide means to (formally) reason about languages and language features, to the extent to become able to appreciate current research and developments in the area of programming languages. Programming languages are a huge area. Consequently, the course tries to focus on fundamental mechanism rather than broadness. Not everything can be covered: the text focuses on static typing, type systems etc., which will comprise the main body of this course as well.
We start from the lambda calculus as the simplest model of a programming language, and gradually extend it with language features. The basics that are covered include
Equipped with this basic skill set, we’ll study more ambitious language constructs, such as:
A likely class project will be an in-depth study of an interesting topic covered by the last bullet above.