Meets: 11:15AM-12:10PM, Monday, Wednesday, Friday in Swift 520
Course material: my notes, web pages, reference texts

The course covers various significant concepts and features in the design and implementation of modern programming languages. Topics include various parameter passing mechanisms, dynamic and static scope rules, dynamic and static binding of subprogram names to subprogram bodies, dynamic and static data typing, eager and lazy expression evaluation, procedural and non-procedural languages, garbage collection and memory management, type safety and non type safety, compilation and interpretation.

Students will write programs in a functional style and in a logic-programming style, in Scheme, Haskell, and Java (instead of Prolog). Students will learn significant aspects of one or more of the above programming languages on their own, from reading (texts and manuals), from interpreting underlying language principles, and from experimentation. Students will organize problem data in terms of appropriate relations. Students will describe problem requirements in terms of formal logic.

Students will learn a specification language and use it to verify the correctness of a simple program.

Based upon problem description and solution requirements, students will select an appropriate programming methodology (imperative, functional, or logic) and explain the reasons for that choice.

Call by value, call by value-result, call by reference, call by name, type safety, type theory, functional language, procedural language, imperative language, declarative language, monad, garbage collection, formal semantics, syntax, lexical scope, dynamic scope, static scope, name binding, name resolution, information hiding, stack, heap, continuations, call with current continuation.

There are numerous sources of material on which the lectures will be based. Most of those are posted on the course website. The texts referred to here also contain much information. It is not required that any of these texts be purchased but it is highly recommended. There are many other great sources of information in this area and the student is encouraged to seek out such material independently.