Concepts in Programming Languages

Covid-19 effects on 2021/22 course

Due to Covid-19 the core material of the course will be presented by videos on the Recordings tab. However, provided the rate of Covid-19 infections drops it is hoped there will additional physical lectures, perhaps on alternative material, perhaps given in the second half of the course.

There will also be 'office hours' on Teams/Zoom, on a subset of the scheduled lecture slots, during which students can pose questions to the lecturer (just like the end of an in-person lecture).

Handouts

• Lecture slides (as PDF, 1-up)
• Lecture slides (as PDF, 4-up)
• 2021/22 Revision Guide.
• Errata/Lacunae:
  • None yet!

Some additional background and code examples

• McCarthy's LISP-in-LISP interpreter explained.
• Tony Hoare's claim that his invention of NULL pointers was a "billion dollar mistake".
• A Java applet and HTML to invoke it (you may have to fight quite hard with your brower to allow this to execute; you can see the HTML with `view source' in your browser).
• JavaScript and the DOM (click the button to execute; see the HTML with `view source' in your browser)
• Mozilla article on JavaScript inheritance and the prototype chain.
• The w3schools tutorial on JavaScript and the DOM.
• Marcelo Fiore's coding of Objects in SML using ML modules.
• A blog entry giving a gentle explanation of the problem of Java covariant arrays and invariant generics.
• Chatley, Donaldson and Mycroft's 2019 paper "The next 7000 programming languages" [sic].

Some additional exercises

• One-per-topic discussion questions
• Why does this C++ code give exactly one type error? Why is this error message necessary for type safety?
• Why does this Java code raise an exception? What happens when the various commented-out code is uncommented?

Supervision question sets courtesy of Andrew Rice

(Note that topics VII, X and XI have been added/re-written since these questions were written.)

• Supervision 1
• Supervision 2

Exercises by Andrej Ivašković

• ConceptsPL_AI_Exercises.pdf

Slides by topic and pointers to further reading material

1. Introduction and motivation.
   Supplementary reading material:
   • K. Zuse. Plankalkül.
2. The first procedural language: FORTRAN (1954-58).
   Supplementary reading material:
   • Fortran.
3. The first declarative language: LISP (1958-62).
   Supplementary reading material:
   • J. McCarthy. Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine.
     Communications of the ACM, 3(4):184-195, 1960.
4. Block-structured procedural languages: Algol (1958-68) and Pascal (1970).
   Supplementary reading material:
   • D. E. Knuth. The remaining trouble spots in ALGOL 60.
     Communications of the ACM, Volume 10, Issue 10, pages 611-618, 1967.
   • B. Kerninghan. Why Pascal is not my favorite programming language.
     AT&T Bell Laboratories. Computing Science Technical Report No. 100, 1981.
5. Object-oriented languages -- Concepts and origins: SIMULA (1964-67) and Smalltalk (1971-80).
   Programming language: Squeak.
   Supplementary reading material:
   • A. C. Kay. The early history of Smalltalk.
     ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Volume 28, No. 3, 1993.
   • P. Wegner. Concepts and Paradigms of Object-Oriented Programming
     Expansion of OOPSLA-89 Keynote Talk.
   • B. Stroustrup. What is Object-Oriented Programming? (1991 revised version).
     Proc. 1st European Software Festival. February, 1991.
6. Types in programming languages: ML (1973-1978).
   Supplementary reading material:
   • A. Koenig. An anecdote about ML type inference.
     USENIX Symp. on Very High Level Languages, 1994.
7. Scripting Languages and Dynamic Typing.
8. Data abstraction and modularity: SML Modules (1984-97).
   Supplementary reading material:
   • M. Tofte. Four Lectures on Standard ML.
     LFCS Report Series ECS-LFCS-89-73, 1989.
9. Languages for concurrency and parallelism
   
10. Functional-style programming meets object-orientation
    Programming language: Scala.
    Supplementary reading material:
    • M. Odersky et al. An overview of the Scala programming language.
      Technical Report LAMP-REPORT-2006-001, Second Edition, 2006.
    • M. Odersky et al. A Tour of the Scala Programming Language.
      Programming Methods Laboratory, EPFL, 2007.
    • M. Odersky. Scala By Example.
      Programming Methods Laboratory, EPFL, 2008.
11. Miscellaneous concepts.

Books

• Main:
  • M. Scott. Programming Language Pragmatics (2nd edition).
    Morgan Kaufmann, 2006.
  • J.C. Mitchell. Concepts in programming languages.
    Cambridge University Press, 2003.
  • T. W. Pratt and M.V.Zelkowitz. Programming Languages: Design and implementation (3rd edition).
    Prentice Hall, 1999.
  • R. Harper. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages.
    Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Other:
  • R. L. Wexelblat (ed.). History of Programming Languages.
    ACM Monograph Series, 1981.
  • N. Metropolis, J. Howlett, G.-C. Rota (eds.). A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century: A Colletion of Essays.
    Academic Press, 1980.
  • T.J. Bergin and R. G. Gibson (eds.). History of programming languages - II.
    ACM Press, 1996.

Further reading material (due to Marcelo Fiore); not needed for examination purposes

• P.J. Landin. The next 700 programming languages.
  Communications of the ACM, Volume 9, Issue 3, 1966.
• D. D. Clark. The structuring of systems using upcalls.
  Proceedings of the tenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 171-180, 1985.
• L. Cardelli and P. Wegner. On understanding types, data abstraction, and polymorphism.
  Computing Surveys, Vol 17 n. 4, pages 471-522, 1985.
• P. Canning, W. Cook, W. Hill, W. Olthoff, J.C. Mitchell. F-bounded polymorphism for object-oriented programming.
  Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Functional Programming Languages and Computer Architecture, 1989.
• R. P. Draves, B. N. Bershad, R. F. Rashid, and R. W. Dean. Using Continuations to Implement Thread Management and Communication in Operating Systems.
  Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, pages 122-136, 1991.
• M. P. Jones. Using Parameterized Signatures to Express Modular Structure.
  In Proceedings of the Twenty Third Annual ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages, 1996.
• M. Odersky, C. Zenger, and M. Zenger. Colored local type inference.
  ACM SIGPLAN Notices archive. Volume 36, Issue 3, pages 41-53, 2001.
• R. Garcia, J. Jarvi, A. Lumsdaine, J. G. Siek, and J. Willcock. A comparative study of language support for generic programming.
  ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Proceedings of the OOPSLA'03 Conference, 2003.
• A. Kennedy and C. Russo. Generalized Algebraic Datatypes and Object-Oriented Programming.
  Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications, 2005.
• N. Wirth. Good Ideas, Through the Looking Glass.
  IEEE Computer, pages 56--68, 2006.
• P. Hudak, J. Hughes, S. Peyton Jones, P. Wadler. A History of Haskell: being lazy with class.
  The Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference (HOPL-III) San Diego, California, June 9-10, 2007.
• A. Kennedy. Lecture slides on Java (1996) and C# (2000), 2007.