Programming Language Principles - Walden University NCSC 6121 Spring 2007

I'm taking this course in the January of 2007 through a distance learning, masters in computer science program at Walden University. — Doug Daniels (Dev Journal) 2006/11/23 19:31

The course objectives are:

• Understand the central issues and principles governing the design of modern programming languages.
• Understand the fundamental differences between the four major programming language paradigms.
• Understand the value of operational and denotational semantic specifications of programming language constructs.
• Implement a syntax analyzer for any reasonable programming language.
• Understand the process of translation of a program in a high-level language to a low-level language.

For the course project I wrote an Abstract Syntax Tree generator for the RPAL language.

• RPAL Java

Listed below are the various topics that were covered in the course. (I'm going to try and provide some additional details such as homework assignments and practical code samples for some of them. — Doug Daniels 2006/12/20 22:00

1. Introduction Paradigms
2. Overview of Compilation
3. Context-free languages and LL(1) grammars
4. Recursive descent parsing, elimination of left recursion and common prefices
5. String-to-tree transduction
6. Generating Abstract Syntax Trees
7. Introduction to the RPAL language
8. Building RPAL programs
9. Building AST's for RPAL programs
10. Name binding and object lifetimes
11. Scope rules
12. Binding of reference environments
13. Functional graphs and evaluation algorithms
14. Attribute grammars
15. An attribute grammar for binary numbers
16. A Tiny language, its syntax, target machine, and attributes
17. An attribute grammar for Tiny
18. Extending Tiny
19. Expression evaluation
20. Control flow, selection, and iteration
21. Recursion
22. Type systems and type checking
23. Records and arrays
24. Pointers and recursive types
25. Stack layout, static links, and displays
26. Parameter passing
27. Generics and exceptions
28. RPAL tree standardization
29. Lambda expressions and the subst function
30. Lambda calculus
31. The RPAL CSE machine
32. Optimizations of the CSE machine
33. Recursion
34. Semantic domains and semantic functions
35. Denotational semantics of Tiny
36. The RPAL denotational description of Tiny
37. Adding new expressions and statements
38. Adding the for statement in C and Pascal
39. Expanding Tiny into Medium
40. C++ as a better C
41. Object-oriented programming in C++
42. Logic Programming