CS471 Programming Language Structure I
Fall 2002

This page will contain links to assignments and other relevant information concerning the course. You should visit here regularly to get this information.

Instructor: Roger Hartley, SH123

When and where: MWF 10:30-11:20 in SH113

Office hours: by appointment only

TA: Xinxia An, 646-3198. Science Hall room 147 (email xan@cs.nmsu.edu.) Office hours TTh, 10:20 - 11:20.

The textbook for the course is "Concepts of Programming Languages" (5th. edition) by Robert Sebesta, published by Addison Wesley.

This semester there will be assignments centered around the idea of providing the semantics of a language through another computer language. This is essentially a job of defining a virtual machine for the language in terms of the constructs of another language and then providing a definition of the language as an interpreter. Thus the semantics of language S are displayed using an interpreter for S written in a language T. Hopefully T is a "simpler" language than S, although this usually means a low-level language, such as an assembler, and interpreters then become very difficult to write correctly. Instead we will use the language RIGAL (see link below) that provides nice facilities for analyzing trees and lists while having a straightforward set of commands and control structures.

Assignments

1. The origins of C

2. Abstract Syntax Trees in Rigal (notes on using Rigal) Sample Answers

3. Denotational Semantics Sample Answer

4. Type compatibility

5. Object-oriented analysis and design

6. Functional Programming

You can view the materials for previous semesters by following the links below.

• Spring 02
• Fall 01
• Spring 01
• Fall 00
• Spring 00
• Spring 99
• Fall 98
• Fall 97
• Fall 96
• Spring 96

Reference documents you might want to look at are:

• The Syllabus
• The Syntax Module
• Topic lists for the first test
• Topics lists for the final exam.
• Examples questions for the first test
• First test given in Fall 98
• First test given in Spring 01, with sample answers
• Take-home final given in Fall 00, with sample answers.
• Activation records in static scoping
• Operational semantics
• Axiomatic semantics
• Denotational semantics
• RIGAL language description and A RIGAL presentation
• A RIGAL interpreter for a simple language
• A RIGAL interpreter for a language with declarations
• Notes on the Lambda Calculus
• Scheme-- in Scheme - a simple interpreter and Two ways to handle recursion
• A Gentle Introduction to ML
• The latest ML documentation
• How Prolog Can Do Arithmetic
• What is Postscript?
• The Scheme Report
• Parsing Techniques - A Practical Guide (Title page)
• The Evolution of Programming Languages