
	COMS 6998 007 Types, Languages and Compilers Spring 2023

General Information

Class meets Mondays, 4:10 - 6:40 PM in 451 CSB.

Staff

Name	Email	Office hours	Location
Prof. Stephen A. Edwards	sedwards@cs.columbia.edu	By appt.	Online
Wei Qiang	wq2167@columbia.edu
Emily Sillars	ems2331@columbia.edu

Overview

An advanced course on modern programming language and type theory with a focus on functional languages and concrete implementations. The goal is to become fluent in the concepts and formalisms typical of papers in conferences such as POPL.

Prerequisites: COMS 4115 Programming Languages and Translators; COMS 3203 Discrete Mathematics; COMS 3261 Computer Science Theory. Equivalents acceptable.

Schedule

Date	Lecture	Notes	Due
Mon Jan 23	Introduction Inductive Definitions
Mon Jan 30	Regular Expressions
Mon Feb 6	Context Free Grammars
Mon Feb 13	The Lambda Calculus
Mon Feb 20	Simply Typed Lambda Calculus
Mon Feb 27	The Hindley-Milner Type System
Mon Mar 6	Operational Semantics
Mar 13-17	Spring Break
Mon Mar 20
Mon Mar 27
Mon Apr 3
Mon Apr 10
Mon Apr 17
Mon Apr 24
Mon May 1
May 9	Final Project Presentations

The Project

You'll perform a design-it-yourself project in the second half of the class.

Resources

Recommended Texts

Robert Harper. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Harper is closest in scope to the class, but we will not follow it slavishly. In particular, it has a lot of detail that will not be discussed.
Benjamin C. Pierce. Types and Programming Languages. MIT Press, 2002. Pierce is also an excellent reference for this course. As its name suggests, it focuses almost exclusively on types. Unlike Harper, it has extensive discussions of how to implement the discussed ideas in code.
Shriram Krishnamurthi. Programming Languages: Application and Interpretation. 2nd ed. Self-Published, 2017. Krishnamurthi uses Racket and is heavy on implementation details. It has some discussion of types and dynamic checking through contracts, but is closer to a compiler implementation text than the others listed here.
Glynn Winskel The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages: An Introduction. MIT Press, 1993. Winskel is an older book that focuses, unsurprisingly, on programming language semantics (operational, denotational, and axiomatic), but also discusses types and the Lambda Calculus.