COSC 337: Programming Languages

Click on the instructor's name, above, for office hours and contact information.

This web page will be used to post assignments and other announcements. Consult it often! In addition, the instructor may use email to communicate with individual students or broadcast important announcements to the entire class. Such messages will be sent to your my.emich.edu mailbox. You should either read this mailbox regularly or set it to forward to an email account which you do read regularly.

Announcements

Announcements of interest to the class.

Additional End-of-Semester Announcements.

Check this space for announcements and references to study material, prior to the final exam.

• Here are some suggested Lisp exercises, with partial answers.
• The following textbook sections contain material for which you are responsible on the final exam: 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 5.4, 5.8, 5.9, 5.10, 10.1, 10.2, 10.3, 10.4, 15.1, 15.2, 15.3, 15.4

LISP Tutorial

You can now access a LISP tutorial.

REMINDER:

Perl programs are due at 7pm on Thursday, December 4. Late penalties: 10% off for up to 24 hours late, 20% thereafter, submission not accepted after a program has been graded and returned to the class. (Bobolink's clock time will be used to determine time of submission. You can type the date command on Bobolink to see what time the server thinks it is.)

• I've put up new documents having to do with server access and Perl programming. See the Links section below.
• The midterm exam was on Thursday, October 23.
• Axiomatic semantics practice problems are now available. Enjoy.
• Two documents on accessing the bobolink Linux server and running Perl programs are now available. See the two new links at the end of the Links section, below.
• To submit a Perl program for credit, log into bobolink and type the command

              submit-perl N FILE
      

  where N is the assignment number (1, 2, or 3) and FILE is the name of the file containing your Perl source code. Example:

              submit-perl 1 wordsrch.pl
      

  (If you developed the program on another machine, you'll have to upload your source file to bobolink before this will work, of course.)

  If you submit an assignment and later decide you want to make changes, just make the changes and submit it again. I will ignore all but your last submission.

  Note: The submit-perl program is itself a Perl program. If you're curious, you can see it here.

Assignments

Announcements of assignments.

Sept. 16

This assignment can be found here.
DUE: Tuesday, Sept. 23, beginning of class.

Oct. 2

Click here to see the 2nd assignment.
DUE: Thursday, Oct. 9, beginning of class.

Nov. 5

Here's an ASSIGNMENT that you can get started on RIGHT AWAY, using online materials (not to be handed in; just to familiarize you with using the system to do Perl).

• Log in to bobolink, change your password, and create and run the "Hello, World" Perl program given in the first section of the Nik Silver's Perl Tutorial. (There's a link to the tutorial on the "Perl Resources" page.)
• Read the tutorial through the section on "Conditionals" and do all the exercises. (You should create working, properly formatted, well-documented Perl programs.)

Nov. 13

The official Perl assignment is now available. Click on the link to see it. DUE: Thursday, December 4, 7pm. Run the submit-perl to submit your programs electronically, as described in the Announcements section, above. Also, turn in hardcopy of all your programs in class.

Links

Links to various places on the internet that are relevant to the course will be posted in this section.

BNFExamples.html

Examples of the use of BNF to specify the syntax of some simple languages.

simplang.txt

BNF definition of a small structured programming language.

BNF syntax descriptions of programming languages.

A little web searching turned up BNF definitions of a few "real" programming languages. The notation differs slightly from that which we have been using, but the ideas are the same.

• Java
• C
• Algol 60
• C++

With a little searching of your own, you can probably find BNF for more languages.

Attribute grammar examples.

• A grammar for assignments
• A grammar for declarations

Implementation of smallest-divisor algorithms.

Go here to see a C++ program that implements the O(n) and O(sqrt(n)) smallest-divisor algorithms developed in class.

Perl Resources

Links to various Perl resources: Documentation, online tutorials, software.

Perl Examples

A collection of short Perl examples illustrating various language features.

Bobolink Accounts

Information on how to connect and log in to the bobolink.acad.emich.edu server.

PuTTY Instructions

Help with downloading, installing, and configuring the PuTTY SSH client.

Doing Perl on Bobolink

A quickstart guide to simple file management and running Perl in a Linux environment.

Perl and Visual Studio

Instructions for configuring Microsoft Visual Studio for use with Perl. (Contributed by Paul North)

Important Dates