CSE 755: Programming Languages, Home page (Neelam's section)

Course Summary: This is a theory of programming languages course. The main goal of the course is to study formal ways of defining syntax and semantics of programming languages. The main topics are attribute grammars; operational, axiomatic, and denotational semantics of languages.
Prerequisites: CSE 625 and CSE 655.
This is a graduate core class; if you are an undergrad and have strong math abilities (at least B/B- in CSE 625, 655), you should do ok; if not, you should probably not take this class.
Credits: 3
Quarter: Wi '12 (Section: 0010-LEC (11952))
Place and Time:
- Bolz Hall 428; T,R at 11:00 am - 12:18 pm
- Final exam: Tuesday, March 13, at 9:30 am-11:18 am
Instructor: Neelam Soundarajan
Office: DL 579.
Office hours: T,R: 10:00 am - 10:50 am.
Other hours by appointment.
E-mail (to neelam@cse) questions strongly encouraged.
Grader:
- Name: Kazuya Sakai
- Off. hrs: F: 3:00-5:00 pm; or make appointment by email.
- Office: Bolz Hall 118, seat 13
- E-mail: sakai AT cse or sakai.16@osu.edu
Course Notes:
Assignments:
- Assignment 0 (Due: Jan. 13, '12): Posted on "cse.course.cse755", the course newsgroup. It won't be available here!
- Assignment 1 (Due: 1/17/'12)
- Assignment 2 (Due: 1/31/'12) (pdf)
  (Here is the CSE 655 homework that contains some problems that try to clarify the relation between the dot and list notations; and solutions to the homework.)
- Lisp Interpreter project (Due: Part 1: 11:59 pm, Feb.\ 22; part 2: 11:59 pm, March 7) (pdf)
- Assignment 3 (Due: 2/21/'12) (pdf)
Announcements:
- The first mid-term is on Thursday, Feb. 2 at 11:30-12:18, in class.
  Topics will be everything we discuss in class by the end of class on Jan. 31.
  You may bring a single "cheat sheet" (size 8"x11"), double-sided, legible font, to the midterm. Write your name at the top of the sheet and turn it in with your exam.
  Here is sample midterm (but don't expect the actual midterm to be exactly like this). Here are solutions to the problems in the sample midterm.
Links:
Books (references):
Unfortunately, there are no good suitable textbooks for the course. You will have to rely on class notes and your own notes. Most important: DO NOT miss classes.
The following books cover some of the material we will be talking about and will be of some use. The first is (or should be) on closed-reserve in the Science/Engineering library. The next three three are available on-line:
1. Formal specification of programming languages, by F. Pagan
2. Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, by J. McCarthy and others
  You can use the Common Lisp (CL) implementation on the stdsun by typing "lisp" at the command line.
  You can also obtain CMU-CL for your own machine.
3. Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (Scheme book) (long, but worth reading; it shows how to write fairly complex systems in Scheme which is a dialect of Lisp).
4. Formal syntax and semantics of programming languages, by Kurtz and Slonnegar
  (The following may also be useful: Slonneger's course.)
5. May be useful: Semantics with applications, Nielson and Nielson
6. Abstract interpretation (not currently part of 755 but may be in the future)
7. Nasko's notes on types
8. For fun: "Truth" about C++
Other:
- Please read the course newsgroup (cse.course.cse755) regularly.
  I will also try to copy of some of the messages posted to the newsgroup here but no guarantees! You would be best off reading the newsgroup regularly.
- Some useful tips about how to read the newsgroup from your home computer (but again, no guarantees! use with caution.)
  If you are using Emacs on Unix/Linux, try adding the following line to your .emacs line:
  (setq gnus-nntp-server "news.cse.ohio-state.edu")
  Then if you type Esc-gnus, that should get it to start reading from the cse newsserver.
- GDB:
  - Tutorial on GDB (a must read if you don't regularly use a debugger).
  - Info on GDB (extracted from (Unix Programming Tools)
- Java tip (based on a student post to course newsgroup in an earlier offering of the course):
```
To get code running with java 1.6 on stdsun you'll need to use the
'subscribe' command to subscribe to JDK6, but then you'll receive some
heap size errors. I emailed the cse help desk about it and got the
following response:

	"You can adjust your heap size by invoking the settings
	parameters. They are:

	-Xms512k (memory heap start size 512 kilobytes)
	-Xmx1024m (memory heap max size 1024 megabytes)

	Both should be invoked at the same time and you may test
	different heap sizes. Our recommendation is 16m to start and
	256m to max."

What worked for me (I couldn't figure out a way to set this
permanently), was to use java calls as "java -Xms16m -Xmx256m somefile".
```
- Please check your CSE e-mail regularly.
  (And if you prefer to read mail on some on other account, use the "forward" mechanism to have all your CSE mail forwarded to that other account.)
  If the grader has problems running your lab, he/she will send mail to your CSE address and it is your responsibility to respond promptly.
  Also please read your OSU e-mail regularly.