CS2013-final-report

CSC 2/454: Programming Language Design and Implementation,
University of Rochester
Rochester, NY
Michael L. Scott
scott@cs.rochester.edu
www.cs.rochester.edu/u/scott/254/
Knowledge Areas that contain topics and learning outcomes covered in the course
Knowledge Area
Total Hours of Coverage
Programming Languages (PL) 35
Where does the course fit in your curriculum
CSC 254 is required of all BS candidates in Computer Science. It is most often taken in the junior year, but
sometimes the sophomore or senior. The CS1–CS2 sequence (locally CSC 171–172) is a prerequisite, as is a local
course (CSC 173) that covers (among other things) finite and pushdown automata, regular expressions, and
recursive descent parsing. The course can be taken for graduate credit (as CSC 454) by first-year MS and PhD
students who lack comparable undergraduate background. The course is offered once a year—recently to
approximately 40 students.
What is covered in the course
CSC 2/454 is an introduction to the design and implementation of programming languages. From the design point
of view, it covers language features as tools for expressing algorithms. From the implementation point of view, it
covers compilers, interpreters, and virtual machines as tools to map those features efficiently onto modern computer
hardware. The course touches on a wide variety of languages, both past and present, with an emphasis on modern
imperative languages, such as C++ and Java, and, to a lesser extent, on functional languages such as Scheme and
Haskell, and dynamic (scripting) languages such as Perl, Python, and Ruby. Rather than dwell on the features of
any particular language, it focus on fundamental concepts and on the differences among languages, the reasons for
those differences, and the implications those differences have for language implementation.
Specific topics include:
• formal aspects of syntax and semantics
• naming, scoping, and binding
• scanning, parsing, semantic analysis, and code generation
• control flow, subroutines, exception handling, and concurrency
• type systems, data abstraction mechanisms, and polymorphism
• run-time systems, virtual machines, and storage management
• imperative, functional, logic-based, and object-oriented programming paradigms
• programming environments and tools
What is the format of the course
254 has historically been taught in a fairly traditional formal, with two 75-minute lectures per week. The instructor
usually works at the blackboard, however, rather than using prepared slides, and the lectures are highly interactive:
student feedback determines the pace and, to a significant extent, the topics that are covered. We are considering the
introduction of peer-led team learning “workshops,” which have been used with great success in the department’s
intro-level courses.
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