
	COMS W4115 Programming Languages and Translators Fall 2015

Lectures

Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays 4:10 - 5:25 PM 207 Mathematics.

Staff

Name	Email	Office hours	Location
Prof. Stephen A. Edwards	sedwards@cs.columbia.edu	see my home page	462 CSB
Richard Townsend	rtownsend@cs.columbia.edu	F 2-4	TA Room (Mudd 1st floor)
Prachi Shukla	ps2829@columbia.edu	T 10-12	468 CSB
David Arthur	da2647@columbia.edu	Th 2-4	TA Room (Mudd 1st floor)
Lixin Yao	ly2328@columbia.edu	M 10-11, W 11-12	TA Room (Mudd 1st floor)
Aquila Khanam	ak3654@columbia.edu	T 5:30-7:30	TA Room (Mudd 1st floor)

Overview

The goal of PLT is to teach you both about the structure of computer programming languages and the basics of implementing compilers for such languages.

The course will focus mostly on traditional imperative and object-oriented languages, but will also cover functional and logic programming, concurrency issues, and some aspects of scripting languages. Homework and tests will cover language issues. You will design and implement a language of your own design in a semester-long group project.

While few of you will ever implement a full commercial compiler professionally, the concepts, techniques, and tools you will learn have broad application.

Prerequisites

COMS W3157 Advanced Programming: You will be dividing into teams to build a compiler, so you need to have some idea how to keep this under control. Quick test: you need to know about Makefiles and source code control systems.

COMS W3261 Computability and Models of Computation: You will need an understanding of formal languages and grammar to build the parser and lexical analyzer. Quick test: you must know about regular expressions, context-free grammars, and NFAs.

Schedule

Date	Session	Lecture	Reading	Due
Wed Sep 9	1	Intro. to Languages	Ch 1, 2
Mon Sep 14	2	Language Processors	Ch. 2
Wed Sep 16	3	Programming in OCaml
Mon Sep 21	4	"
Wed Sep 23	5	Guest lecture
Mon Sep 28	6	Ocaml contd.
Wed Sep 30	7	"		Proposal
Mon Oct 5	8	"
Wed Oct 7	9	Syntax and Parsing	Ch. 3, 4
Mon Oct 12	10	"
Wed Oct 14	11	"		HW1
Mon Oct 19	12	"
Wed Oct 21	13	The MicroC Compiler	App. A	HW2
Mon Oct 26	14	Review for Midterm		LRM
Wed Oct 28		Midterm Exam
Mon Nov 2		Election Day Holiday
Wed Nov 4	15	MicroC Contd.
Mon Nov 9	16	MicroC Contd.
Wed Nov 11	17	Types and Static Semantics	Sec. 6.5
Mon Nov 16	18	Runtime Environments	Ch. 7	Hello World
Wed Nov 18	19	"
Mon Nov 23	20	"
Wed Nov 25	21	Code Generation
Mon Nov 30	22	The Lambda Calculus
Wed Dec 2	23	"
Mon Dec 7	24	Logic Programming		HW3
Wed Dec 9	25	Review for Final
Mon Dec 14		Final Exam
Tue Dec 22		Project Reports Due

Required Text

Alfred V. Aho, Monica Lam, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman.
Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools.
Addison-Wesley, 2006. Second Edition.

The first edition was long the standard text on compilers; the second edition of the ``dragon book'' has now been updated and continues to be one of the more readable books on the topic. Columbia's own Prof. Al Aho is one of the authors.

Related Texts

Michael L. Scott. Programming Language Pragmatics Morgan Kaufmann, 2006. Second Edition. A broad-minded book about languages in general, but has less on practical details of compiler construction.
Andrew W. Appel. Modern Compiler Implementation in ML. Cambridge University Press, 1998. The opposite of Scott: focuses on compiler construction, not language design issues. It uses the functional language ML, which is closely related to O'Caml, but just different enough to be annoying.
Lawrence C. Paulson ML for the Working Programmer. Cambridge University Press, 1996. Second edition. A book about functional programming. It's written for the ML language, not O'Caml, but the two are closely related.
Steven S. Muchnick Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation. Morgan Kaufmann, 1997. A very extensive book on many aspects of compiler design. Starts about halfway through Appel and goes much farther. Recommended for serious compiler hackers only.

Objective Caml Resources

	The Caml Language Homepage. Compiler downloads and documentation. Start here.
	The Objective Caml System. Documentation and User's Manual for the whole system, including documentation for ocamllex, ocamlyacc, ocamldep, ocamldebug, and all the standard libraries.
	Jason Hickey, Introduction to Objective Caml. One of my favorite books on O'Caml.
	Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury, and Bruno Pagano, Developing Applications with Objective Caml. An online book translated from the French (O'Reilly).
	Objective CAML Tutorial
	O'Caml source for the four-function calculator.
	O'Caml source and test cases for the microc language.

The Project

The focus of 4115 is the design and implementation of a little language. You will divide into teams and design the goals, syntax, and semantics of your language, and implement a compiler for your language.

Exception: CVN students will do the project individually.

Final Report Outline

This is a critical part of the project and will be a substantial fraction of the grade.

Include the following sections:

Introduction
- Include your language white paper.
Language Tutorial
- A short explanation telling a novice how to use your language.
Language Manual
- Include your language reference manual.
Project Plan
- Identify process used for planning, specification, development and testing
- Include a one-page programming style guide used by the team
- Show your project timeline
- Identify roles and responsibilities of each team member
- Describe the software development environment used (tools and languages)
- Include your project log
Architectural Design
- Give block diagram showing the major components of your translator
- Describe the interfaces between the components
- State who implemented each component
Test Plan
- Show two or three representative source language programs along with the target language program generated for each
- Show the test suites used to test your translator
- Explain why and how these test cases were chosen
- What kind of automation was used in testing
- State who did what
Lessons Learned
- Each team member should explain his or her most important learning
- Include any advice the team has for future teams
Appendix
- Attach a complete code listing of your translator with each module signed by its author
- Do not include any automatially generated files, only the sources.

Project Resources

	A two-page introduction to the CVS version control system. I strongly suggest you keep your project under some version control system.
	An excellent final report: the Funk language by 4115 students Naser AlDuaij, Senyao Du, Noura Farra, Yuan Kang, and Andrea Lottarini.
	An excellent final report: the Sheets language by 4115 students Benjamin Barg, Gabriel Blanco, Amelia Brunner, and Ruchir Khaitan.

Language Reference Manuals

	Dennis M. Ritchie, C Reference Manual
	Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language
	The C Language Reference Manual (SGI)
	Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language
	The Java Language Specification
	The C# Language Specification
	Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language

Projects

LFLA: Language for Linear Algebra (AK)