Assignment 1

The Origins of C

Goals

To learn a little about the origins of C, and to read a description of an unfamiliar language to understand the semantics of the language.

Procedure

Browse the history of languages diagram (www.cs.nmsu.edu/~rth/cs/cs471/lang.pdf) on the web site and find the language that is the original source of present day C. Then browse the web to find descriptions of that language and answer the following questions:

  1. what is the language called?
  2. who developed the language?
  3. where did he work at the time?
  4. what does the command x,y,z := 1,2,3 do? (i.e. what is its semantics?)
  5. what does (B*[i] -> f, g) [1, Z[i]] do? (i.e. again, what are its semantics?)

Grading

  1. 2 points
  2. 2 points
  3. 2 points
  4. 4 points
  5. 10 points

(total 20 points)

Due Date

August 30th. by 5:00pm.