COMS W4115 Programming Languages and Translators Summer 2016

Lectures

Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays 5:30 - 8:40 PM 627 Mudd.

Staff

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	Notes	Reading	Due
Wed Jul 6		Intro. to Languages Some Outstanding Projects Language Processors		Ch 1, 2 Ch. 2
Fri Jul 8		Programming in OCaml
Mon Jul 11		Syntax and Parsing		Ch. 3, 4	Proposal
Wed Jul 13		Syntax and Parsing Cont.
Mon Jul 18		The MicroC Compiler		App. A	HW1
Wed Jul 20		Types and Static Semantics		Sec. 6.5	LRM
Mon Jul 25		Runtime Environments		Ch. 7
Wed Jul 27		Code Generation
Mon Aug 1		The Lambda Calculus Logic Programming			Hello World
Wed Aug 3		Parallel Programming			HW2
Mon Aug 8		Review for Final
Wed Aug 10		Final Exam
Thu Aug 11		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.
	Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury, and Bruno Pagano, Developing Applications with Objective Caml. An online book translated from the French (O'Reilly).
	Objective CAML Tutorial
	OCaml source for the four-function calculator.
	OCaml source and test cases for the MicroC language, which generates LLVM IR.

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:

1. Introduction
   • Include your language white paper.
2. Language Tutorial
   • A short explanation telling a novice how to use your language.
3. Language Manual
   • Include your language reference manual.
4. 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
5. Architectural Design
   • Give block diagram showing the major components of your translator
   • Describe the interfaces between the components
   • State who implemented each component
6. 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
7. Lessons Learned
   • Each team member should explain his or her most important learning
   • Include any advice the team has for future teams
8. 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

Projects

FL: Financial Computations Language (GG) Proposal Mathew Federer

Macaw: Mathematical Calculation Language (GG) Proposal LRM Final Report Slides Project Files William Hom, Yi Jian, Joseph Baker, and Christopher Chang

simpliCty: C Lite (GG) Proposal LRM Final Report Project Files Rui Gu, Adam Hadar, Zachary Moffitt, and Suzanna Schmeelk

GAL: Graph Application Language (RT) Proposal LRM Final Report Slides Project Files Anton Nefedenkov, Donovan Chan, Macrina Lobo, and Andrew Feather

Liva: Java Lite (RT) Proposal LRM Final Report Slides Project Files Shanqi Lu, Jiafei Song, Zihan Jiao, Yanan Zhang, and Hyoyoon Kim

YAGL: Yet Another Graph Language (RT) Proposal LRM Final Report Slides Project Files Anthony Alvarez, and David Ding

Scala--: Scala Lite (SE) Proposal LRM Final Report Slides Project Files Da Liu

Grading

Collaboration

You will collaborate with your own small group on the programming project, but you may not collaborate with others on homeworks. Groups may share ideas about the programming assignments, but not code. Any two groups found submitting similar code will receive zero credit for the whole assignment, and repeat offenses will be referred to the dean. See the Columbia CS department academic policies for more details.

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