CSCE-604 Programming Language Design (Spring 2011)

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  "CSCE604" is useful information.

• Assignment 4 is out [Tue Mar 1 14:13:46 2011]
• Assignment 3 is out [Sat Feb 26 17:27:46 2011]
• Assignment 2 is out [Wed Feb 9 13:07:43 2011]
• Assignment 1 is out [Thu Jan 27 15:46:37 2011]

Programming languages are an active research area, the goals of which include ever safer, more efficient, and expressive languages and programming environments. Results from recent programming language research are finding their way to main stream languages, both C# and Java have recently been extended with generics, Java with wildcards, C# with LINQ. C++ is changing significantly with several new language features. Furthermore, new interesting languages, such as Scala with advanced type systems are being introduced, Spec# combines a theorem prover with a mainstream language, built-in support for representing XML data is being added to several languages. New languages aimed primarily to concurrent programming, and new abstractions to existing languages to better support concurrent programming are being introduced. The list goes on. For a motivated student, this class is an opportunity to get involved in this exciting research area.

20% of your course grade will be based on assignments and quizzes, 80% on a research project and/or exams. Participation, or more accurately, lack of it, can influence your grade you achieve otherwise from assignments and your project or exams, negatively, up to 10%. A grade of 90% or above guarantees an A, 80% or above a B, 70% or above a C, and 60% or above a D.

All grade assignments are final—unless there was a mistake made in recording your semester grades or in computing your final grade. If all numbers are correctly recorded and computed, I will not discuss changing the resulting letter grades.

There are situations that may warrant regrading a particular assignment. For example, making addition errors in computing your score, not seeing an answer that you gave, or not understanding an answer that you gave. Requests for regrading of assignments must be made within one week after the graded work has been handed back.

Academic Integrity Policy: An Aggie does not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. The Honor Council Rules and Procedures are available on the web http://www.tamu.edu/aggiehonor.

The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal anti-discrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities. If you believe you have a disability requiring an accommodation, please contact Disability Services, in Cain Hall, Room B118, or call 845-1637. For additional information visit http://disability.tamu.edu.

Many programming assignments will be done with Haskell, here are a few pointers to get you started:

• The "Official" Haskell Web-site
• A gentle introduction to Haskell Version 98
• The Haskell 98 Report
• Glasgow Haskell Compiler

Material useful for specific assignments:

• Parsec parser generator

A few other compilers exist, but we will use the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. An easy way to interact with GHC is to edit your document, say, Foo.hs in your favourite editor (== Emacs, with haskell-mode), and invoke the GHC interpreter in a shell window:

ghci -fglasgow-exts

The most commonly used commands are

• :l Foo to load the module Foo (from your file Foo.hs)
• :r to re-load the previously loaded module
• :i x to inspect the value, type, … x
• :q to quit the interpreter

The compiler is invoked, for example as:

ghci -fglasgow-exts --make

The --make option chases automatically which modules need to be recompiled, so you don't have to write a Makefile yourself. (Also GHC's analysis of what need to be recompiled is more fine grained, thus faster).