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<title>Princeton CS 441 Programming Languages, Spring '96</title>

<h2><!WA0><A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/">Princeton</A> CS 441 Programming Languages, Spring '96</h3>

<h1><!WA1><img src="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/lambdasmall.gif" alt=""> Home Page</h1>

<FONT SIZE=1>
(Image borrowed from the Indiana
<!WA2><A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/c311/fall95/c311/home.html">C311</A>
page, courtesy of Erik Hilsdale.)
<FONT SIZE=3>

<ul>
<li> <!WA3><A HREF="#overview">Overview</A>
<li> <!WA4><A HREF="#classinfo">Class Information</A>
<li> <!WA5><A HREF="#texts">Textbooks</A>
<li> <!WA6><A HREF="#syllabus">Syllabus</A>
<li> <!WA7><A HREF="#notes">Lecture Notes</A>
<li> <!WA8><A HREF="#assign">Assignments</A>
<li> <!WA9><A HREF="#tools">Tools</A>
<li> <!WA10><A HREF="#exams">Examinations</A>
<li> <!WA11><A HREF="#acks">Acknowledgments</A>
</ul>

<A name="overview"></A>
<h2>Overview</h2>

This course provides an introduction to the principles underlying the
design of both modern and legacy programming languages.  By developing
a series of interpreters that study various characteristics of
programming languages, students will obtain a deep understanding of
language semantics.  Such understanding provides a firm basis for
selecting a language for a particular task and for graduate study in
programming languages and compilers.  To a lesser degree, this course will
also cover programming paradigms, implementation concerns, and formal
specification of programming language semantics.

<p>

Previous CS 441 courses at Princeton were taught using Kamin's book
and involved writing interpreters in Pascal. While this course is
similar in content, we will be developing interpreters in
<!WA12><A HREF="http://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/scheme-home.html">Scheme</A>.
Not only is Scheme better suited to this task, but using Scheme will
give students some first-hand experience with an advanced programming
language.

<h3>Course Topics from Academic Calendar</h3>

Principles, theory, and implementation of modern programming
languages.  Name binding, macros, parameter passing, and closures.
Continuations, coroutines, and objects.  Types, modules, and
representation independence.  Compilation by transformation.  Lambda
calculus, operational semantics, and denotational semantics.


<A name="classinfo"></A>
<h2>Class Information</h2>

<dl>
<dt> Instructor
<dd> <!WA13><A HREF="http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/wright.html">
     Andrew Wright</A>, room 206, Princeton x2211, NEC 951-2781,
     <!WA14><A HREF="mailto:[e-mail]">
    [e-mail]</A>.
<dd> Office Hours: before or after class, by appointment via email.

<dt> TA
<dd> <!WA15><A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ahpah/">
     Paul Martino</A>, room 216, x8058,
     <!WA16><A HREF="mailto:[e-mail]">
     [e-mail]</A>.
<dd> Office Hours: Tuesday 3-4pm

<dt> Lecture Hours
<dd> Tuesday, Thursday from 10:30am - 11:50am in room 102.

<dt> Web Page (this page)
<dd> <!WA17><A HREF="http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/cs441/">
http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/cs441/</A>

<dt> Local newsgroup
<dd> pu.cs.441

<dt> Grading
<dd> 35% midterm
<dd> 35% final exam
<dd> 20% assignments
<dd> 10% Scheme quiz

</dl>

<A name="texts"></A>
<h2>Textbooks</h2>

<dl>

<dt> <B>Required:</B>
<dd> <i>Essentials of Programming Languages</i> by Friedman, Wand and
Haynes, McGraw-Hill, ISBN 0-07-022443-9.  Chapter six of this textbook is out of date;
get an updated chapter six in <!WA18><A HREF="ftp://ftp.cs.indiana.edu/pub/eopl/ch6.ps">postscript
format</A>.
Also <!WA19><A Href="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/tcheck.ps">here</A> is a draft chapter on types and type inference.

<dt> <B>Recommended:</B>
<dd> <i>The Little Schemer</i> by Friedman and Felleisen, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-56099-2.
      An older book called
     <i>The Little Lisper</i> will do if you can find a used one.
<dd> <i>The Seasoned Schemer</i> by Friedman and Felleisen, MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-56100-X.

</dl>

<A name="syllabus"></A>
<h2>Tentative Syllabus for 
<!WA20><A HREF="http://www.princeton.edu/Main/95-96.html">
Spring '96</A></h2>

<dl>
<dt> Week of Feb 5
<dd> Introduction to Scheme.  <i>The Little Schemer</i> chapters 1-10.
<dd> Induction, Recursion, and Scope. <i>EOPL</i> chapter 2.
<dd> Static Properties of Programs.  <i>EOPL</i> chapters 2 and 3.1.

<dt> Week of Feb 12
<dd> Syntactic Abstraction and Data Abstraction. <i>EOPL</i> chapter 3.
<dd> Advanced Scheme.  <i>The Seasoned Schemer</i> chapters 11-18.
<dd> Interpreters, <i>The Seasoned Schemer</i> chapter 20, <i>EOPL</i> chapter 5.
<dd> <B>Scheme Quiz</B> on material from week of Feb 5.

<dt> Week of Feb 19
<dd> Representation Independence and Dynamic Scope. <i>EOPL</i> chapter 5.
<dd> Parameter Passing. <i>EOPL</i> chapter 6.

<dt> Week of Feb 26
<dd> Continuation Passing Style.  <i>EOPL</i> chapter 8,
<i>The Seasoned Schemer</i> chapters 13, 14, 19.

<dt> Week of March 4
<dd> Continuation-Passing Interpreters.  <i>EOPL</i> chapter 9.

<dt> Week of March 11
<dd> Review and Midterm Exam.

<dt> Week of March 18
<dd> Ski week, no lectures.

<dt> Week of March 25
<dd> Imperative form and Registerization.  <i>EOPL</i> chapter 10.

<dt> Week of April 1
<dd> Garbage Collection.
<dd> Formal Semantics.

<dt> Week of April 8
<dd> Type systems.

<dt> Week of April 15
<dd> Module systems.

<dt> Week of April 22
<dd> Object systems.

<dt> Week of April 29
<dd> Whatever is left (logic programming?)

<dt> May 6 - May 14
<dd> Reading period.

<dt> May 15 - May 23
<dd> Final exams.  (last possible due date for take home is May 18)

</dl>

<A name="notes"></A>
<h2>Lecture Notes</h2>

Lecture notes for each class will be typeset and appear online one or
two days after each class.

<ul>
<li>
<!WA21><a href="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/notes.html">Lecture Notes</a>
</ul>

<A name="assign"></A>
<h2>Assignments</h2>

One assignment will be due each week.  Most assignments will involve
implementing some language facility in an interpreter.  Assignments
will be available Thursday and due the following Thursday <b>at the
beginning of class</b>.  Solutions will be discussed in class after
assignments are collected, hence late assignments will not be
accepted.  Solutions will also be posted online.

<P>

Assignments will be graded for both <I>content</I> and <I>style</I>
(where <I>style</I> has a specific meaning that should become clear in
class).  Since there are two points per assignment, the grades are
simple: right (2), close (1), and wrong (0).

<ul>
<li>
<!WA22><a href="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/assignments.html">Assignments and Solutions</a>
</ul>

<A name="tools"></A>
<h2>Tools</h2>

Scheme is our most important tool.  Here are some useful Scheme links:
<ul>
<li> <!WA23><A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository/R4RS/r4rs_toc.html">
     R4RS Scheme definition</A>.
<li> <!WA24><A HREF="http://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/ftpdir/scheme-7.3/">MIT Scheme</A>.
<li> <!WA25><A HREF="http://swiss-ftp.ai.mit.edu/scheme-home.html">Scheme Home Page at MIT</A>.
<li> <!WA26><A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/scheme-repository/home.html">
     Indiana Scheme Repository</A>.
</ul>

We are using MIT Scheme for this course.
<!WA27><A HREF="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/mitscheme.html">Here</A> are a few useful things to know
about MIT Scheme.  To get started, type "scheme" in a shell to start a
Scheme read-eval-print loop.  You can now type definitions and
expressions interactively, or load files using (load "file.scm").
Even if you are familiar with emacs, you may want to do the first
assignment this way.
Alternatively, you can run
<!WA28><A HREF="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/mitscheme-emacs.html">Scheme under Emacs</A>.

<p>

For the interpreters we'll be building in this course, you
need to install a few <!WA29><A HREF="http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/extensions.html">extensions</A> to Scheme.

<p>

Even if you don't run Scheme under Emacs, you probably want to edit
Scheme programs using Emacs, because it has nice automatic indentation
facilities.  A better indentation style than the default can be
enabled by placing
<pre>
    (setq load-path (cons "/u/cs441/emacs" load-path))
</pre>
in a file called ".emacs" in your home directory.

<A name="exams"></A>
<h2>Examinations</h2>

The following is a tentative schedule for CS 441 examinations:

<ul>
<li> Scheme Quiz (in class) during the week of Feb 12.
<li> Midterm Exam, the week of March 11.
<li> Final Exam, May 15 - May 23.
</ul>

<!WA30><a href=http://www.CS.Princeton.EDU/courses/archive/spr96/cs441/study.html>Here</A>
is a study guide for the final exam.

<A name="acks"></A>
<H2>Acknowledgments</H2>

This course combines ideas and structure from:
<ul>
<li> <i>Essentials of Programming Languages</i>
<li> <!WA31><A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/classes/c311/fall95/c311/home.html">C311</A>
at Indiana University as taught by
<!WA32><A HREF="http://www.cs.indiana.edu/hyplan/dfried.html">Dan Friedman</A>
<li> <!WA33><A HREF="http://www.cs.rice.edu/~matthias/311web/">
CS 311</A> at Rice University as taught by
<!WA34><A HREF="http://www.cs.rice.edu/~matthias">Matthias Felleisen</A>
</ul>

<hr>

<ADDRESS>
<!WA35><A HREF="http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/homepages/wright.html">
Andrew Wright</a> /
<!WA36><a href="http://www.neci.nj.nec.com/">
NEC Research Institute</a> /
<!WA37><a href="mailto:[e-mail]">
[e-mail]</a>
</ADDRESS>