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 '09 (Call no.: 04360-6 (M); 04359-8 (non-M)).
Place and Time:
- BO 428; M,W,F at 12:30 pm - 1:18 pm
- Final exam: Tuesday, March 17, at 11:30 am
Instructor: Neelam Soundarajan
Office: DL 579.
Office hours: M,W,F: 11:30 am - 12:20 pm.
Other hours by appointment.
E-mail (to neelam@cse) questions strongly encouraged.
Grader:
- Name: Na Li
- Off. hrs: Tuesday, Wednesday: 2:00-3:00; or make appointment by email.
- Office: DL 274
- E-mail: lina AT cse
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. They are on closed-reserve in the Science/Engineering library. The last two 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 (Thanks to George Bulwinkle for the link to the on-line copy.)
3. Formal syntax and semantics of programming languages, by Kurtz and Slonnegar
4. Semantics with applications, Nielson and Nielson
Course Notes:
Assignments:
Other (including announcements):
- The second mid-term is on Mon., March 2. Topics will be everything we discuss in class until then; only topics discussed since the first midterm are included. (Note, however, that the finals will be comprehensive.)
  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. It stresses consistency/completeness a bit too much; the actual midterm will have less of a stress on this topic. Also it doesn't have any Lisp; expect to have a question related to that in the actual midterm.
  You should still be able to handle the questions in the sample to a reasonable extent. For example, for question (2), see if you can show that with the proposed change, the existing axiom will be inconsistent by deriving a result that is invalid in the new model. For the last question, you should be able to show that the resulting system will be consistent and complete (with respect to the standard model) by showing that every result derivable using the standard rule is also derivable using the new rule and vice-versa (and assuming that the standard system is consistent and complete w.r.t. the standard model).
  I also decided to post sample solutions to the problems in the sample midterm.
- The first mid-term is on Mon., Feb. 9. Topics will be everything we have discuss in class so far.
  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).
- Slonneger's course (Slonneger is one of the authors of one of the books listed above).
- Please read the course newsgroup (cse.course.cse755) regularly.
- Posts about reading course newsgroup: The following messages were posted on the course newsgroup by a couple of students in the class. I thought it would be useful to copy them over here:
  - ```
  Posted on Wednesday, 2/4:
  
  1. As I said at the end of class today, you don't need to give me the
  assignment in class on Friday. You can give it to me (or slip it under
  my office door - DL 579) any time on Friday. Or you can email it to me
  (by Friday, 11:59 pm). If you email, please use plain text or .pdf,
  not .doc.
  
  2. For the problems that ask you to define a LISP function to do
  something, it is always okay to define additional auxiliary functions
  and call those in your main function.
```
- ```
From: gregory james marsh 
Subject: You can use pine to view news
Newsgroups: cse.course.cse755
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 15:12:14 -0500

For those people liking unix terminal apps, one can use the popular
"pine" mailer interact with newsgroups.  I'm doing it right now:

http://www.washington.edu/pine/faq/news.html

Greg
```
  - ```
  From: "Chao Ma" 
  Subject: tutorial of "Configuring Outlook 2007 to View Newsgroups"
  Newsgroups: cse.course.cse755
  Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 18:19:17 -0500
  Organization: The Ohio State University Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering
  
  http://answers.vt.edu/kb/entry/3360/
  
  also need to use SSL for our news server
  
  Chao
```
- Since some people are still having trouble reading news on the newsgroup, I will try to copy over some of those messages here.
- 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.