CS162 Programming Languages

Instructor: Vebjorn Ljosa, Trailer 936, room 103
Office hours: T 14:00--16:00
Teaching assistant: Aram Melkoumian
Office hours: TR 11:00--12:30 in CSIL
Lectures: TR 12:30--13:45, Bldg. 387, room 103
(between Psychology and parking lot 3)
Discussions: F 09:00/09:50, Phelps Hall, room 1401
Midterm exam: T 2007-02-13, Bldg. 387, room 103
Final exam: T 2007-03-20, 12:00--15:00, Bldg. 387, room 103

Preliminary list of topics

Syntax: Rules that define valid programs and let the compiler infer the structure of a program.
Semantics: Formal and informal ways of describing the meaning of programming language constructs?
Attributes, binding, scope, and types: What's in a name?
Argument passing: Call by reference, value (copy in, copy out), and name. This is where formal semantics come in handy.
Lambda calculus: A different way to think about computation, and the basis of functional programming.
Functional programming: Higher-order functions, eager vs. lazy evaluation, and other goodies.
Stack-based languages
Type systems: Statically typed, dynamically typed, and duck typed, manifest typed, and untyped languages.
Generic functions: Methods that specialize on more than one argument.
Polymorphism, pattern matching, and inheritance
Concurrency (maybe)
Exception handling: There's more to it than try and catch.
Logic programming