Principles of Programming Languages and Environments

Lectures: 21 h

Recommended for:
Foundational course for ECSEL.

The course last ran:
1998.

Prerequisites:
MSc in a non-computer science area and some programming experience.

Organization:
The course is mainly based on lectures, estimated 21 hours, 3 hours per week. The students should have a quick reading of the material before each lecture to enable discussions. There will also be a few practical programming exercises, e.g. generating a small translator from specifications, started during an introductory laboratory session of 2-4 hours.

Contents:
1. What is a programming language? Abstractions in programming languages. Computational paradigms. Language definition, translation and design.

2. Language design principles such as efficiency, generality, orthogonality, and uniformity.

3. Language properties. Syntax, basic semantics. Data types, type information, type constructors, type equivalence, type conversion. Control constructs, procedure environments, activations, allocations. Abstract data types. Overloading and polymorphism. Modules and separate compilation. The mathematics of abstract data types.

4. Programming paradigms. Procedural programming, object-oriented programming languages, functional programming languages.

5. Basic semantics, such as bindings, semantic functions, scope, allocation, extent, the environments. Formal semantics of programming languages. Operational semantics, Natural Semantics, and Denotational semantics. Automatic generation of language implementations from specifications.

6. Principles and methods behind interactive and integrated programming environments. The notion of consistency. Examples of such environments. Source code configuration management and version control syste

Literature:
Kenneth C. Louden: Programming Languages, Principles and Practice. PWS Publishing
Company, Boston, 1993. (ISBN0-534-93277-0)

Peter Fritzson: Specifying Practical Translators using Natural Semantics and RML.
(kompendium). Peter Fritzson: System Development Environments. (kompendium).

Examiner:
Peter Fritzson.

Schedule:
Spring 1999.

Examination:
Written examination or homework problems. A few practical programming excercises. Active participation during lectures.

Credit:
3 credits

Page responsible: Director of Graduate Studies