CSC 272
Software II

Principles of Programming Languages
Spring, 2012

Syllabus	Calendar	Homework	PSP	Textbook	Moodle	Daily Survey

This course meets from 12:00-12:50 MWF in the Math/CS Department lab. Our main textbook will be Shriram Krishnamurthi's Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation, which is available on the Web for free.

My office hours are MWF 11:00-12:00 and T 10:00-4:00.

I also taught this course, in various guises, in Spring 1995, Spring 1996, Spring 1997, Spring 1998, Spring 2008, Spring 2010, and Spring 2011.

Software

Scheme

I presume you all know how to get DrRacket. To use the PLAI language, switch languages to "Use language specified in source", then type #lang plai in the Definitions pane (in place of the #lang scheme which should be there automatically) and click the "Run" button. Now you'll have type-case and define-type available to you, with test rather than check-expect for writing test cases.

Haskell

For this course, I recommend using the Haskell Platform, which is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This includes a Haskell compiler as well as ghci, an interactive platform.

Other Suggested Reading

• My favorite tutorial on Haskell is Learn You a Haskell for Great Good.
• Yet Another Language Geek, a blog about .NET programming in a functional (as opposed to imperative) style (the Rx library for C#, for example, feels a lot like DrScheme's FrTime language, in which variables can have time-varying values).
  EDIT: The above may have been superseded by the development of the F# Language, a functional cousin of C#.
• I recommend reading some of Paul Graham's essays. He covers lots of different topics, including high-tech entrepreneurship, but one of his favorites is programming language design. See in particular
  • Succinctness is Power
  • What Languages Fix
  • The Hundred-Year Language
  • Five Questions about Language Design
  • Revenge of the Nerds
  • Beating the Averages
  • Hackers and Painters
  • Holding a Program in One's Head
  • Taste for Makers
  .