Csc 3112 Principles of Programming Languages

The course introduces students to the low level organization and operation of programming languages. It covers semantic and syntactic as well as operational issues in programming languages. The building blocks of programming languages are explored.

The aims of the course are

• To make students appreciate the possible future evolutions of pro- gramming languages

• To expose students to causes of operational (like performance, security, etc) characteristics of programming languages
(c) Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students will be able to:

Teaching will be largely by lectures, tutorials and class assignments

• Types: role of types in programming and programming languages, types and their operations: products, sums, functions, recursive types, reference and array types

• Primarily imperative issues: control flow, arrays, pointers and references, parameter-passing mechanisms, scoping

• Type systems: strongly typed languages type checking (static vs. dynamic), type equivalence (by name vs. structural), overloading, coercion, polymorphism, type inference

• Binding: declarations and environments. Block structure: scope and visibility, stack discipline. Bound occurrences: static vs. dynamic binding.

• Encapsulation: information hiding, modules, abstract data types, classes

• Language implementation: parsing, code generation, garbage col- lection.
(f ) Assessment method

Assessment will be by Tests and Assignments (40%) and final written examination (60%)