CS2013-final-report

How are students assessed
There is one homework assignment every two weeks involving both a theoretical component, in which students are
expected to prove theorems about languages, and a practical component, in which students are expected to
implement a language concept. The theoretical component develops a new idea or expands on an idea presented in
lecture, and the practical component builds on the theory to guide the implementation. There are two examinations,
an 80 minute open-book midterm examination, and a 180 minute open-book final examination. Homework accounts
for 50% of the grade, the midterm 20%, and the final 30%. Letter grades are assigned relative to overall class
performance, with borderline cases influenced by extra credit problems, participation in class and recitation, and
effort displayed through attendance at office hours and general quality of work. The assignments take
approximately 12 hours to complete.
Course textbooks and materials
Practical Foundations for Programming Languages by Robert Harper, Cambridge University Press, 2013. All
programs are written in Standard ML. All written material is typeset in LaTeX. All homework is graded by hand by
the teaching assistants.
Why do you teach the course this way
The course has a reputation for being very challenging, but also very stimulating. The students appreciate greatly
the power of types as a scientific theory of programming, and develop great facility with using types and operational
semantics to model computational phenomena and to use these models to prove theorems about systems.
This course is not in any way a taxonomy of programming languages, nor is it a tour of the zoo of popular
languages. Rather it provides a solid grounding in the design, analysis, and implementation of programming
languages, which express a rich variety of computational phenomena.
Body of Knowledge coverage
KA Knowledge Unit Topics Covered Hours
AL Basic Analysis Work, Span,
2
Asymptotics
DS
Sets, Relations, Inductive definitions 1
Functions
DS Logic Constructive and 1
Classical Logic
DS Proof techniques Structural induction, 1
rule induction
OS Concurrency Synchronization, 6
Communication
OS Scheduling Scheduling parallel 1
computations
PD
Parallelism
Deterministic
3
Fundamentals
parallelism, fork/join,
futures
PD Parallel Decomposition Fork/Join, Data 1
PD
PL
PL
Parallel Algorithms,
Analysis, and
Programming
Object-oriented
Programming
Functional
Programming
Parallelism
Parallelizability, Divide
and Conquer, Pipelining
Dynamic Dispatch,
Static and Dynamic
Classification
Pattern matching,
Recursion,
Continuations,
Parallelism, Laziness
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