2110316 Programming Languages Principles 3(3-0-6)

1st semester 2013

Prabhas Chongstitvatana

official course description

Principal lecturer: Twittee. This course is divided into three equal parts. Three parts are taught by three different lecturers.

1) Programming Language concepts, Twittee
2) Non-imperative programming language, Vishnu
3) Language and implementation, Prabhas

The goal of this course is to make you understand the languages you use. To make you appreciate diversity of ideas in programming and prepare you for new programming methods and paradigms. Theoretical foundations will be presented. You will know properties of language, not just syntax. Moreover, you will recognize the cost of presenting an abstract view of machine and understand trade-offs in programming language design.

Each part will be taught separately and independently. It is logical that the assessment will also be arranged according to this structure. There is no midterm exam (besides whatever assess by the lecturer at that time) and the final exam will contain all materials taught in the course.

Assessment

each part 20% by 3 = 60%
final exam 40%

the lecture schedule:
section 1: T, V, P
section 2: V, P, T
section 3: P, T, V

Language and implementation

This part concerns a compiler for a programming language. There are two aspects of learning this part: theory and practice. The theory will be given in the lectures. The practice is carried on as homework and classwork. To teach effectively and to enrich your C programming skill, I choose to design a toy language and implement its compiler in C. You will be studying an actual compiler and modify it.

old lecture 2009 2010 2011 2012

Announcement

4 June 2013 Add alternative site for this webpage. Please visit the site and bookmark it. Presently, the departmental site is not stable.
18 June 2013 Add reference to Surreal Numbers
25 June 2013 Section 3: project announced. deadline is 11 July. I promise to up old exam questions soon.
9 July 2013     Quiz for Section 3 is here. deadline is 18 July, 4pm. Hand in to Khun Su, floor 17, admin. office.
15 Aug 2013   Quiz for current section is here It will be a take-home. The deadline to hand-in the answer is 19 Aug, 4pm. Hand in to Khun Su, floor 17, admin. office.
19 Sept 2013   Quiz take home Please hand-in to Khun Su at the office before 4pm Monday 23 Sept.

Study Plan

plan for 4 weeks, with one week to spare
each week has 2 sessions of 1 1/2 hrs. each.
a homework will be handed out each week.
one project will be issued on week 3.

workload

one small project
one in-class exam
weekly homework, running the code

Lecture sessions

1 structure of a compiler      Overview of the course   (from Stanford slide)    Compiler (ppt)
   High Level Language to Low Level Language to Processor architecture
   Demonstrate the actual compiler of this course RZ.
   Recursive programming with List
2 lexical analyser      Scanner (ppt)
--------------------------
3 grammar               Context Free Grammar (ppt)
4 parsing    Parsing (ppt)    top-down parsing   How to compute First and Follow set (by Prof. Kamin at UIUC)
                                LL parser at Wiki
----------------------------
5 actual parser         project announcement
6 code generator        Code Generation (updated) Som v2.0 virtual machine   S-code
    recursive evaluator    here is the source code in C for an interpreter of Rz parse tree    eval3.c
---------------------------
8 actual code generator How to do code generation     Zero Assember
   exam
-----------------
9-10 spare additional topics

Assessment for this part

homework        5%
one project       5%
exam              10%
total               20%

Homework and project

Section 1

Classwork

Section 2
...

Homework

Section 2
1. Learn how to write in Rz by reading Quick Start Rz.
2. Download and compiler the compiler used in this class (rz33-1.zip). Use whatever compiler for C that you are familiar with and compile it. Try it out to compile some simple program.
3. Write a "recursive" program to copy a complex list.
4. Figuring out what this regex means /* ([^*]*[^/]*)* */

Project

Design a Domain Specific Programming Language (DSL) (look it up in wiki). Write a short report of your study on the topic. Your work must include the following:
1) Motivation, what is your language good for? why you did it this way?
2) Description of the language, in an informal way. That should include,
3) Examples of the use of your language.
4) Write the Grammar for your language.
bonus: If you can compare your language with existing language (which is related) you will get additional "like" :-)
5) I expect around 4 pages of report. But it should take as many pages as needed to explain your design.
6) Hand in by 22 Aug 2013, 4pm. at the box in front of my office. I will not accept any submission after this time.

Hint: Make your language small, (or you can show just a beautiful subset of the language). It is a big job to design a full and complete language. For example, the inventors of C language wrote a whole book (although not very thick) to describe it including how to program in C. I think C grammar took about 10 pages long.

This will take about 10 hours of your time. The report can be in either Thai or English. The length of the report is about 4-5 pages. I am interested in the "quality" of the report not the "quantity". You should try to explain your idea in your own word.

Reference Text

-- Aho, Sethi, Ullman, Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools. Addison-Wesley, latest edition.
-- Louden, K.C., Compiler Construction: Principles and Practice. PWS Publishing Co., 1997.

The first one is the standard text book on compiler. It has been used in more than 100 universities in North America. It is a bit difficult to read as it contains a lot of theory. The second one (Louden) is much easier to read. I will update some chapter from my textbook from time to time as necessary.

Extra reading

A chart of genealogy of programming languages (pdf) (You need to zoom to 100% to see it)
Programming Recursion (to familiar yourself with recursive programming)
I mentioned the book "Surreal Numbers" by Knuth. Here is the link to the details Knuth site, and I found the link to text here fulltext .

Tools

See my Rz language homepage
the compiler package with code generator for s-code rz33-1.zip
Zero Assembler: source, example and executable (including som v2 vm) source: zas.c

How to use the compiler

Use rz33-1.zip to compile and run your programs. Here is what a session looks like. Go to rz33/test directory (that you unzip the package to). There are two executable files: rz33.exe and somv2x.exe. Try to compile "fac.txt". It is shown here:

// factorial

      

      fac(n){

        if( n == 0 ) return 1;

        else return n * fac(n-1);

      }

      

      main(){

        print(fac(6));

      }

Here is the command line and the output at the screen:

D:\prabhas\bag\rz\rz33\test>rz33 fac.txt

      fac

      main

      (fun main (print (call fac 6 )))

      (fun fac (else (== #1 0 )(return 1 )(return (* #1 (call fac (- #1 1 ))))))

      

      :main

          fun.1

          lit.6

          call.fac

          sys.1

          ret.1

      :fac

          fun.1

          get.1

          lit.0

          ...

You will get the file "fac.obj" as an output file. It is an object file that is executable under Som VM (a kind of virtual machine similar to JVM). You can "run" it under somv2x.

D:\prabhas\bag\rz\rz33\test>somv2x fac.obj

      720

That's it. Enjoy!

Prabhas Chongstitvatana
contact address: prabhas at chula dot ac dot th
office room 18-13 Engineering Building 4, floor 18. tel 02-2186982
research lab: Intelligent Systems, floor 20.

Last update 19 Sept 2013