Computer Laboratory – Course material 2008–09: Concepts in Programming Languages

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Concepts in Programming Languages

Lecturer: Dr M.P. Fiore

No. of lectures: 8

Prerequisite courses: None.

Aims

The general aim of this course is to provide an overview of the basic concepts that appear in modern programming languages, the principles that underlie the design of programming languages, and their interaction.

Lectures

Introduction, motivation, and overview. What is a programming language? Application domains in language design. Program execution models. Theoretical foundations. Language standardization. History.
The first procedural language: FORTRAN (1954-58). Execution model. Data types. Control structures. Storage. Subroutines and functions. Parameter passing.
The first declarative language: LISP (1958-62). Expressions, statements, and declarations. S-expressions and lists. Recursion. Static and dynamic scope. Abstract machine. Garbage collection. Programs as data. Parameter passing. Strict and lazy evaluation.
Block-structured procedural languages: Algol (1958-68) and Pascal (1970). Block structure. Parameters and parameter passing. Stack and heap storage. Data types. Arrays and pointers.
Object-oriented languages -- Concepts and origins: Simula (1964-67) and Smalltalk (1971-80). Dynamic lookup. Abstraction. Subtyping. Inheritance. Object models.
Types. Types in programming languages. Type systems. Type safety. Type checking and type inference. Polymorphism. Overloading. Type equivalence.
Data abstraction and modularity: SML Modules (1984-97). Information hiding. Modularity. Signatures, structures, and functors. Sharing.
The state of the art: Scala (2004-06). Procedural and declarative aspects. Blocks and functions. Classes and objects. Generic types and methods. Variance annotations. Mixin-class composition.

Objectives

At the end of the course students should

be familiar with several language paradigms and how they relate to different application domains
understand the design space of programming languages, including concepts and constructs from past languages as well as those that may be used in the future
develop a critical understanding of the programming languages that we use by being able to identify and compare the same concept as it appears in different languages

Recommended reading

Books:

* Mitchell, J.C. (2003). Concepts in programming languages. Cambridge University Press.
* Odersky, M. (2008). Scala by example. Programming Methods Laboratory, EPFL.
* Pratt, T.W. & Zelkowitz, M.V. (2001). Programming languages: design and implementation. Prentice Hall.

Papers:

Kay, A.C. (1993). The early history of Smalltalk. ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 28, No. 3.
Kernighan, B. (1981). Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language. AT&T Bell Laboratories. Computing Science Technical Report No. 100.
Koenig, A. (1994). An anecdote about ML type inference. USENIX Symposium on Very High Level Languages.
Odersky, M. et al. (2006). An overview of the Scala programming language. Technical Report LAMP-REPORT-2006-001, Second Edition.
McCarthy, J. (1960). Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine. Communications of the ACM, 3(4):184-195.
Stroustrup, B. (1991). What is Object-Oriented Programming? (1991 revised version). Proceedings 1 $^\mathit{st}$ European Software Festival.

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