CSC 270
Survey of Programming Languages

Instructor: Dr. Stephen Bloch

Fall, 2010

This course meets from 12:15-1:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Science 227.
The last time I taught this course was Fall 2009.

Syllabus	Calendar	Grading	Assignments	PSP	Moodle course	Examples	Daily Survey

Announcements

Throughout the semester (ideally every few days), I'd like you to fill out the daily survey to help me keep track of what people are finding easy, and what people are having trouble with. This can also be used as an anonymous "suggestion box".

Getting Help

My office hours (in my new office, Post 203; if I'm not there, look in the computer lab in Post 102) are Mondays 12:00-3:00, TTh 11:00-12:00, and Wednesdays 9:00-1:00.

Who should take this course?

This course is intended primarily for students majoring or minoring in computer science or information systems. It assumes CSC 171 and 172 as prerequisites. If you're taking 172 concurrently with 270, you'll have a more difficult time, but you should be able to survive the course; talk to the instructor.

Subject matter

There are more details in the syllabus, but in brief, we'll learn bits of three languages --- Scheme, C++, and Prolog --- that are new to most of you. We'll do simple exercises in each language to make sure we understand the basics, then do a a few more substantial programs in each language. And for more of an "under the hood" view, we'll write interpreters for some very simple languages, so we can see some of the subtleties involved in implementing a language.

In all languages, you will be expected to follow good general programming practices: give meaningful names for variables, types, and functions; use named constants for "magic numbers" that appear more than once in a program; provide test cases for all parts of your program; use white space and indentation as appropriate in the language to enhance readability; segregate I/O from computation as much as possible; write several small functions that do one thing each rather than a single big function that does many things; plan for re-use, modification, and extension; etc. If you're not sure what any of these things means, ask me -- ideally in class, as your classmates probably have the same questions.

Textbooks

• There are several books with titles like C++ for Java Programmers on the market, but they're all fairly out-of-date, so we'll just use on-line materials.

• Felleisen et al's How to Design Programs. This is a textbook for beginning programming, which happens to use Scheme. Since you know the basic concepts of programming already, you should be able to skip through those parts quickly and concentrate on learning the language.

  For this purpose, I recommend starting with the incomplete second edition. Chapter 1 will get you very quickly through the Scheme syntax for function calls, variable definitions, function definitions, conditionals, and even a bit of GUI programming. Chapter 2 revisits these topics in more detail, and discusses the step-by-step process of designing and developing a program, as well as "structures" (classes with fields) and polymorphism. Chapter 4 (chapter 3 hasn't been written yet!) covers lists and recursion, which are both easier in Scheme than in Java. After that, we run out of Second Edition, but the complete 2001 edition of the book is at www.htdp.org.

• The first few chapters of my Scheme-based textbook, also free on-line. (The whole book is not free, but it's fairly inexpensive.)

• Shriram Krishnamurthi's Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation. This is intended as a textbook on programming language implementation, for upper-level undergraduate or beginning graduate students. We'll do a few chapters of it this semester, and more next semester in CSC 272. This book, too, is free on-line (although you can order a printed copy if you want).

• The Amzi Prolog Tutorial, also free on-line.

Other Reading

• Cay Horstmann's tips on Moving from Java to C++
• The University of Wisconsin's on-line tutorial on C++ for Java Programmers
• My collection of adages on software engineering
• An article on How to Become a Hacker
• An article on Programming Paradigms for Dummies (which is not at all "for dummies"; it's a high-level view of, allegedly, every conceivable programming language and every conceivable programming paradigm, and how they all fit together).
• A New York Times article on the effect of language on thought. It's concerned with natural languages, not programming languages, but it raises interesting issues that could well apply to programming languages too.
• Different people learn (and teach) in different ways. Try taking a Learning Styles Questionnaire to discover your own style and get some tips on how to handle classes taught in a different style. If you're having trouble with the way I explain things, it could just be that I'm strongly intuitive and global, while you're strongly sensitive and sequential (or something like that); point it out to me, and I'll try to find another way to explain.
• Amzi's Prolog Tutorial
• On the history of programming languages: see Eric Levenez's History of Computer Languages, especially the very cute timeline diagram.
• Also on the history of programming languages: a recent article entitled The Semicolon Wars.
• How Not to Program in C++ (book free on-line if you're an ACM member)
• The book Effective Java, by Joshua Bloch (no relation); once you know how to write legal Java, this book will teach you how to write good Java.
• 99 bottles of beer, showing how to produce the lyrics to the song "99 Bottles of Beer" idiomatically in over 1000 different programming languages.

Software

Scheme

There are several Scheme implementations available, but the one most widely-used in education is DrScheme, freely downloadable for Windows, Macintosh, Unix, etc. One of its nice features is language levels: if you're a "Beginning Student", you'll get error messages for certain things that are technically legal in Scheme but which a beginning student doesn't need. If you decide you do need a certain feature, you can promote yourself to "Intermediate Student", "Advanced Student", etc. with a few mouse-clicks. The currently-installed version of DrScheme, by the way, includes not only six pedagogical subsets of Scheme, but four subsets of Java and one of Algol 60....

In June, 2010, the PLT version of Scheme was renamed "Racket", and the DrScheme program was renamed DrRacket. As far as I know, pretty much everything that worked in Scheme last year still works in Racket this year, but we may find some minor incompatibilities.

To get the latest version onto the lab computers,

1. download this file and unzip it into your F: ("Persistent Storage") drive (this should only need to be done once, unless somebody deletes it).
2. Then open the "Racket" folder and double-click the "copystuff" script, which will copy some stuff from the F: drive onto the C: drive (this needs to be done every time the computer is rebooted, since that wipes the C: drive).

Some of the Scheme we do will be in the PLAI dialect. How you switch to this dialect depends on your version.

In DrRacket,...

change the #lang racket line to #lang plai .

In DrScheme on a Windows machine in a campus lab:

Download this file, expand it (it doesn't matter where), and open the folder it expands to (which should be named "plai"). Double-click the file "copy-plai.bat" in this folder; it'll copy a bunch of stuff into the right places on your computer. Then run DrScheme, choose the "Language" menu, click the triangle next to "Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation", select "PLAI Scheme", and click "OK".

Macintoshes in campus labs:

Download this file into your Downloads folder, expand it, and open the folder it expands to (which should be named either "plai" or "plai-mac"). Double-click the file "copy-plai" in this folder; it'll copy a bunch of stuff into the right places on your computer. Then run DrScheme, choose the "Language" menu, click the triangle next to "Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation", select "PLAI Scheme", and click "OK".

Your own Macintosh or Windows machine:

You're probably better off downloading the latest version of DrRacket, which makes this easy.

General Development Environments

I recommend Eclipse, a professional-level development environment which is available for free download and has "plug-ins" available to work with several different languages: Java, C, C++, Prolog, etc.

Another possibility is jGRASP, which is designed for first-year programmers and therefore has fewer "professional" bells and whistles, but provides a cute graphical annotation of the control flow of your program. It works best on Java, but it can support C, C++, and Ada as well.

C++ and C

Microsoft Visual C++ may be installed on the Windows machines in the lab, but I don't particularly like it. Eclipse is also installed, as is (I think!) a C/C++ compiler. If you want to use Eclipse for C/C++ programming at home, first install Eclipse; then you'll need a C/C++ compiler. On Windows, see these directions (updated Oct. 15, 2009) to get Eclipse working with the C and C++ compilers. On Mac and Unix, you've already got a C/C++ compiler, so you can use these simpler directions instead.

Prolog

We'll be using a free implementation of Prolog called "SWI Prolog". It should be installed on the machines in the lab.

• If you're on a Windows XP machine like the ones in our labs, ...
  1. Download and expand this file.
  2. Run the "SWI Prolog Windows Installer". When it asks where to install the software, pick a location on the F: drive (so it'll still be there next week). It may give you a warning about being unable to modify the Registry; don't worry about that.
  3. Open the "setup-editor" folder and run the "setup" program. Again, install it somewhere on the F: drive. It may be a good idea to "save configuration settings in INI-files", and put those on the FD: drive too, rather than "in Registry", but I don't know how important that is. Once it finishes installing, it will run the editor.
  4. Now you can delete the "SWI Prolog" folder that you downloaded in step 1.
• If you're on a Mac, I haven't set up a similar download for you yet; watch this space.
• In all other situations,
  1. visit this page, choose an appropriate package, download and install it according to the directions.
  2. That will give you a Prolog interpreter that runs from Terminal. It would be nicer to have an IDE with syntax highlighting, an integrated interpreter/editor, etc. but I'm still looking for that; the one described above only works for Windows.

Partners for upcoming assignments

Software support

I've set up some forms for entering and viewing PSP data. You may use these forms to record defects, time allotted, time spent, and program size, but I won't require this information. To use the forms successfully, make sure your browser accepts JavaScript and cookies. (For those with a moral opposition to cookies, I assure you that they're all "temporary" -- they disappear as soon as you quit the browser.) (For more information about PSP, see the PSP page at Carnegie-Mellon or read Watts Humphrey's Introduction to the Personal Software Process.)