about

Instructor:

Ben Delaware

bendy at purdue.edu

Office Hours: Tuesday 2:30-4:00, LWSN 2116M

Teaching Assistant:

Shivaram Gopal

gopals at purdue.edu

Office Hours: Monday+Wednesday 4:00-5:00, HAAS 264

Course Description:

This is a course on the principles of programming languages and their application. The emphasis is on ideas and techniques relevant to practitioners, but includes theoretical foundations crucial for deeper understanding: abstract syntax, formal semantics, type systems, and modularity. Work in the course involves exploring programming languages and features both as a user (by writing programs in those languages), as a language designer (by implementing interpreters for those languages), and as a scholar (by proving mathematical properties of them). We will investigate approaches to modularity such as data abstraction, inheritance, and polymorphism independent of their realization in any particular language. The course will also offer a historical perspective on the evolution of programming languages and why some designs thrive while others fail. Upon successfully completing this course, students will be able to:

1. Write efficient and correct programs in a functional programming language, Haskell.
2. Precisely formulate the syntax and runtime behavior of a programming language.
3. Specify different notions of type safety for a programming language and reason about a programming language's semantics via mathematical induction.
4. Distinguish between different approaches to modularity and abstraction provided by programming languages.

The course is structured into five sections, the first four of which roughly align with these topics. The final section will consider the realization of some of these ideas in Rust, a modern systems programming language.

resources

Course Text:

Types and Programming Languages . Benjamin Pierce.

Learn You a Haskell for Great Good! . Miran Lipovaca.

Discussion Forum:

The course piazza site will serve as the discussion board; all course announcements will also be posted there. In lieu of emailing the instructor or the TA with any general questions about using Coq or assignments, please post them to piazza so that any other students with the same question can see the answer.

policies

Grading:

Final grades will be assigned according to the following breakdown:

Homework Submission:

Homeworks are to be submitted via turnin by 9PM on their assigned due date. You receive two courtesy late days for the semester. Once you have used both those days, any late homeworks will not be accepted. While students can discuss assignments at a high-level, each student should produce the solutions they submit individually. A more detailed discussion of academic honesty can be found here.

schedule

Note: This schedule is preliminary; it will likely change over the course of the semester to adapt to reality.