I. Preliminaries to the first meeting
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            WELCOME  TO
             Com S 541
      PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES 1

Professor Gary T. Leavens
	  229 Atanasoff Hall

phone:	  294-1580
email:	  leavens@cs.iastate.edu

Office Hours: MW 1, TR 2


1. Pick up handouts ( of them)
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 A. staff introductions
 B. student introductions
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            INTRODUCE YOURSELF

1. Name

2. Graduate student in Com S?

3. Languages you know well?

4. Background in
    (a) programming languages
    (b) compilers

5. Reason for taking 541
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 C. adjustments
II. introduction
 A. prerequisites
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         PREREQUISITES

Com S 440

+ context-free grammars
+ compiler data structures
+ run-time costs of various features
+ large software programming experience

	    OR

Com S 342

+ basic constructs of languages
+ interpreters
+ interpreter data structures
+ design alternatives for features
+ functional programming

Com S 331

+ formal language theory

Com S 411

+ software engineering practice
+ large software programming experience
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 B. plan for the course
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        PLAN FOR THE COURSE

We will negotiate this.

Beginning (see HW 0):

    - read 2 papers on language design,
      discuss next time.

    - presentations on overview topics

    - decide on syllabus.

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  1. description
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        COURSE DESCRIPTION

Survey of the goals and problems of
language design.  Formal and informal
studies of a wide array of programming
language features including type systems,
naming, state, and control.  Creative use
of functional, object-oriented,
declarative, concurrent and other
programming paradigms.

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  2. potential topics
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            POTENTIAL TOPICS

I. paradigms
 A. object-oriented
     with Smalltalk, Java, or C++, ...
     OO design
     multi-methods
     formal semantics
 B. functional
     with Haskell, ML, or Scheme, ...
     streams and lazy data structures
 C. declarative
     with lambdaProlog, Prolog, or OBJ3
 D. parallel pocessing
     distributed programs
     SR programming language
II. Semantics
 A. Syntax
 B. Static semantics
  1. axiomatic sematics
  2. types (polymorphism, ...)
 C. Dynamic semantics
  1. Operational semantics
  2. Denotational semantics
      state, recursion, etc.
 D. Algebraic semantics
 E. Action semantics
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