CS251 (Programming Languages) Fall 2010, Carleton College

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Week 1: Scheme, functional programming

13 September 2010 (M): a Pythonic intro to the course.
PS1 was distributed in class today. It's due Tuesday (survey/team preferences) and Wednesday.
15 September 2010 (W): syntax, semantics, and academic honesty.
PS2 was distributed in class today. It's due ~~Friday~~ Monday. (There's assigned reading from the Scheme book contained therein.)

Your team is responsible for sending me an academic honesty proposal by Monday.
17 September 2010 (F): intro to Scheme: syntax, define, lambda, etc.

Week 2: functional programming

20 September 2010 (M): syntax review plus some if/quote/and/or; some practice; tail recursion
Reading: Dybvig §2.4–2.8.

PS3 was distributed in class today. It's due Wednesday and Friday.
22 September 2010 (W): let/letrec/let*/letrec*; tail recursive append; beginning to think about evaluation.
24 September 2010 (F): higher-order functions.
All reading to date: Dyvbig Chapter 1, Chapter 2, §3.2, Chapter 4, §5.1–5.5, §5.9, §6.1–6.4.

PS4 was distributed in class today. It's an individual assignment due Wednesday.

PS5 was distributed in class today. It's due on Monday, 4 October.

Week 3: evaluation

27 September 2010 (M): evaluation; the substitution model.
29 September 2010 (W): the substitution model, in Scheme.
Here is the Scheme reference guide that I'll distribute with the exam.
1 October 2010 (F): prelim #1

Week 4: C, imperative programming; anatomy of an interpreter

4 October 2010 (M): C Q & A
Reading: Start K & R.
6 October 2010 (W): linked lists in C.
PS6 was distributed in class today. It's due Monday, 11 October 2010.
8 October 2010 (F): memories (in C); brainstorming the pieces of an interpreter.

Week 5: more on interpreters

11 October 2010 (M): some C bits (malloc, macros, = vs ==).
PS7 was distributed in class today. It's due Wednesday, 20 October 2010.
13 October 2010 (W): thinking about how to tokenize; some more fun with C (unions, enums, etc.)
15 October 2010 (F): tokenization oddities (Fortran), midterm evaluations, and some more on C (prototypes, assert).

Week 6: tokenization and parsing

18 October 2010 (M): midterm break!
20 October 2010 (W): valgrind; various tokenization approaches; working on your tokenizers.
Submit your new PS7 code to your Subversion repository by Monday, 25 October 2010.
22 October 2010 (F): context-free grammars and parsing

Week 7: functions and parameters, evaluation

25 October 2010 (M): the parsing assignment, evaluation, and the environment model.
PS8 was distributed in class today. It's due Friday, 29 October 2010.
27 October 2010 (W): environment model, with let/let*/letrec.
29 October 2010 (F): environment model; variable scope.
PS9 was distributed in class today. It's due Monday, 8 October 2010.

Week 8: memory management, garbage collection, tail recursion, exam #2

1 November 2010 (M): macros vs. functions; local/global/no state; garbage collection.
3 November 2010 (W): prelim #2 (open note; warning: may be Schemier than you were expecting).
5 November 2010 (F): questions regarding the interpreter; garbage collection.

Week 9: memory; λ-calculus

8 November 2010 (M): interpreter questions; garbage collection; set-car!, set-cdr!, and reverse!
The final piece of the final project was distributed in class today. It's due on the last day of classes, 17 November 2010.
10 November 2010 (W): tail recursion, Currying, and λ-calculus.
12 November 2010 (F): λ-calculus: booleans, pairs.

Week 10: types and OOP; wrapup

Finals Period:

Our finals slot is from 12:00–2:30p on Saturday, 20 November 2010. The exam will be open note. It is comprehensive.