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Anyone interacting with a computer must communicate with it using some
kind of language. From the application user's point of view this is
often a languages of gestures, menu selections and typed text
with each application having its own little
"user language."
The programmer is interested in getting the computer to carry out some
complex task, usually repeatedly. He or she must specify the steps in
such a way that they can ultimately be expressed to the computer in
its native machine language. Although it's possible for the
programmer to express the desired steps directly in the native
machine language, this turns out to be impractical for many
reasons. Instead, the programmer usually expresses his or her
computation in a high-level programming language, and
relies on another program, a compiler, to translate the high-level
program to machine language.
What are the desired characteristics of such a high-level programming
language? It depends on many things. In general, we would like them to
be such that at least the following properties hold:
- The language can be reliably implemented on the underlying machine.
- The language can be efficiently implemented on the underlying machine.
- The language supports the programmer in that it doesn't require too much useless work.
In this course we will study the design, specification and
implementation of programming languages with these properties in mind.
This is a rigorous, hands-on course that follows the learn-by-doing
philosophy. Students will learn about the design and specification of
programming languages and will learn how to implement various language
features. Two major subplots are: 1. to give you better insight into
the nature of software and the software engineering process, and 2. to
introduce you to the increasingly popular fun style of programming.
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