Principles of Programming Languages

Course
Course Catalog URL: 
http://catalog.iastate.edu/azcourses/com_s/
Identifier: 
COM S 3420
Professor(s): 
Ashwin Kallingal Joshy,
Clay Stevens

Last Updated: Fall 2024

Offered during Fall and Spring Semesters each year.

  1. Credits and contact hours: 3 credits, 4 contact hours
  2. Instructor’s or course coordinator’s name: Ashwin Kallingal Joshy, Clay Stevens
  3. Text book, title, author, and year: An Experiential Introduction to Principles of Programming Languages, Hridesh Rajan
  4. Other supplemental materials: Concepts of Programming Languages, Robert W. Sebesta, Pearson

Specific course information

  1. Brief description of the content of the course: A variety of programming languages and paradigms exist today and more are being invented as we speak. Although theoretically every task can be accomplished in any Turing-complete programming language, in practice, there is a tight correlation between selected programming language, software development task, programmer productivity, and overall software efficiency and quality. A judicious choice of programming language is thus of utmost importance. COMS 3420 provides undergraduate students with a scientific basis for this selection.
  2. Prerequisites or co-requisites: Minimum of C- in COM S 2280 and MATH 1650; COM S 2300 or CPR E 3100
  3. Required, elective, or selected elective? Required

Specific goals for the course

  1. Specific outcomes of instruction:
  • Write and modify programs in a functional style.
  • Make effective use of data abstraction.
  • Change or enhance interpreters to have features such as: control flow, variables, recursion, scoping, syntactic sugars, arrays, parameter passing mechanisms, type checking, objects, and inheritance.
  • Write programs using such features and explain their behavior.
  • Explain the data structures and algorithms used in interpreters.
  • Compare alternatives in programming languages design and implementation.

Brief list of topics to be covered

  • Formal language theory: regular languages, context-free languages,  finite state automata
  • Functional Programming: Write and modify programs in functional style, introduction to languages such as Scheme and Haskell and language implementation techniques such as lazy data structures and monads
  • Make effective use of data abstraction
  • Learn about language constructs by changing or enhance interpreters to have features such as: control flow, variables names and bindings, recursion, static and dynamic scoping, syntactic sugars, arrays, parameter passing mechanisms, continuations, co-routines, objects, and inheritance
  • Write programs using such features and explain their behavior
  • Type System: Learn about concepts such as type, type system, design decisions for types, type inference, type checking and execution errors
  • Learn about language constructs by changing or enhance interpreters to have features such as: types and type checking rules. Write program using such features and explain their behavior
  • Explain the data structures and algorithms used in interpreters
  • Logic programming: Prolog, resolution principles, unification algorithm, search with backtracking, cut operation, negation as failure
  • Compare alternatives in programming language design and implementations