CS 3040 - Programming Languages and Translators

4 lecture hours 0 lab hours 4 credits

Course Description
This course studies programming languages and their implementations. This includes discussions of data types, storage management, syntax, BNF descriptions, domain-specific languages, semantics, lexical analysis, parsing, and compilation. Traditional and more modern programming languages are used as examples. Students use a functional programming language to construct interpreters and translators for multiple, domain-specific languages. (prereq: CS 2040)

Course Learning Outcomes
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:

Specify regular and context free languages
Write moderately sized programs in Haskell
Apply regular expressions to construct programming language tokenizers
Use recursive descent and parser generators to build parsers, interpreters, and translators for simple languages
Give a formal specification of a type system and compare various systems
Construct an operational semantics for a simple programming language
Discuss storage and data management, including binding, scope, lifetime, and automated garbage collection
Build a domain-specific language along with tools to process that language

Prerequisites by Topic

Procedural and object-oriented programming in a scripting language
Procedural and object-oriented programming in C and C++
The impact of typing systems on efficiency, readability, and reliability

Course Topics

Implementing a recognizer for a small domain-specific language
Regular expressions and their translation to finite state machines
Constructing an abstract syntax tree
Interpreting and compiling simple computer programs
Specifying context-free grammars
Operational semantics
Specifying type systems
Variable binding, scope, lifetime, and storage management
Functional programming

Coordinator
Dr. Robert Hasker

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CS 3040 - Programming Languages and Translators