COMP 321: Principles of Programming Languages

Objectives

In this course, you will learn the theory and practice of programming languages. Specifically, you will learn to:

• Organize programming concepts around types.
• Define the syntax, static, and dynamic semantics of programming languages using inductive definitions.
• Prove theorems about programming languages, such as relating static and dynamic semantics by type safety.
• Implement type systems and operational semantics for simple programming languages.

You will apply these skills to study programming language features such as functions, data types, dynamic typing, polymorphism, abstract types, objects, control effects, state, laziness, parallelism, and concurrency.

Prerequisites: COMP 212, or permission of instructor. Students without knowledge of functional programming (as is often taught in CS II) may need to do some extra background reading.

Activities

There will be two course meetings per week, Tues-Thurs 2:40-4pm in Exley 137. This time will be used for chalk-board lectures, and possibly for interactively coding as a whole class and small-group or individual work. Lectures will be your primary source of information for the course, and attendance is strongly encouraged.

There will be 6 or 7 homework assignments, each 1 to 2 weeks in duration. Assignments will have both written and programming components; programming will be in Standard ML.

Readings will be assigned from Practical Foundations for Programming Languages by Robert Harper. An online preview is available here.

Assessment

Your grade will be based on homework assignments (50%), a midterm exam (20%), a final exam (25%), and class participation (5%). (Percentages are subject to change.)