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Course Objectives

Prerequisites

Approach

Typical Text

Course Outline

Course Objectives
To cover the important semantic concepts found in widely used or influential high-level programming languages.

Prerequisites
COMP 410 is a hard prerequisite.

Approach
This is a one-semester undergraduate course in programming languages. The general themes that will be emphasized are types, program abstraction, binding time, and the degree to which the structure of a langugage determines its implementation. Semantic and structural issues will be emphasized over syntactic issues.

Typical Text
C. Ghezzi and M. Jazayeri, Programming Language Concepts, 2nd edition

Course Outline

Introduction and Overview (1)

Data Types (3)

• Primitive and parameterized types
  
• Strong typing and type-checking
  
• Abstract data types
  

Program Abstraction (5)


• Scope rules
  
• Control structures
  
• Procedures, including parameter transmission methods
  
• Modules
  

Run-time implementation (4)


• Compiler-interpreter spectrum
  
• Activation records
  
• Stack and heap storage management