I. Preliminaries for the first meeting
 A. staff introductions
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                WELCOME TO
                Com S 541
         PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES 1

Professor Gary T. Leavens
          229 Atanasoff Hall

Phone:  294-1580
Email:  leavens@cs.iastate.edu

Office Hours: MW 1, TR 2

Class URL: http://www.cs.iastate.edu/
                    ~leavens/ComS541.html

Pick up handouts: (  of them)
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 B. student introductions
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            INTRODUCE YOURSELF

 1. On the board write your:
     a. name
     b. email address

 2. Graduate student in Com S?

 3. Programming Languages you know well?

 4. Previous classes in this area?

 5. Reason for taking 541?
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II. the course
 A. prerequisites
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              PREREQUISITES

Com S 440

+ context-free grammars
+ compiler data structures
+ run-time costs of various features
+ large software programming experience

                    OR
Com S 342

+ basic constructs of languages
+ interpreters
+ interpreter data structures
+ design alternatives for features
+ functional programming
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 B. plan for the course
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           PLAN FOR THE COURSE

We will negotiate this.

Beginning (see HW 0):

    - read 2 papers on language design,
      discuss next time

    - presentations on overview topics

    - decide on syllabus
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  1. description
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            COURSE DESCRIPTION

Survey of the goals and problems of
language design.  Formal and informal
studies of a wide array of programming
language features including type systems,
naming, state, and control.  Creative use
of functional, object-oriented,
declarative, concurrent and other
progamming paradigms.
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  2. potential topics
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             POTENTIAL TOPICS

I. paradigms
 A. object-oriented
    with Smalltalk, Java, or C++...
    OO design
    multi-methods
    formal semantics
 B. functional
    with Haskell, ML, or Scheme...
    streams and lazy data structures
 C. declarative
    with lambda Prolog, Prolog, OBJ3
         or AKL, Prolog(R)
 D. parallel programming
    distributed programs
    SR programming language
II. Semantics
 A. Syntax
 B. Static Semantics
  1. Axiomatic Semantics
  2. Types (polymorphism,...)
 C. Dynamic Semantics
  1. Operational Semantics
  2. Denotational Semantics
      state, recursion, etc.
 D. Algebraic semantics
 E. Action semantics
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