CS 380 2025spring ibarland

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Programming Languages
CS380, 2025spring

ITEC380 is an introduction to the study of programming languages. Topics include:

• History of programming languages
• Brief survey of programming paradigms
• Functional languages, and functions as values
• Declarative, non-algorithmic languages
• Declaration models (binding, visibility, scope, and lifetime)
• Writing recursive function over recursive data (lists, trees)
• Parsing (concrete and abstract syntax, abstract syntax trees)
• Application of context-free grammars in recursive-descent parsing
• Assigning semantics to a parse tree

• Describe the salient characteristics of several language paradigms (procedural, object-oriented, imperative, declarative/logic, functional), and write small programs in each paradigm.
• Distinguish between syntactic issues and semantic issues in programming languages, use formal techniques (such as BNF) in the specification of language syntax and the construction of language parsers, and explain and modify code that assigns semantics to parse trees.
• Describe, and discuss the effects of, different forms of variable binding, scoping, and lifetime.
• Define type safety, static and dynamic typing, explicit and implicit type declarations and coercions, and function types; and describe their roles in program development

Course Information, 2025spring

• Time,Place: TH 09:30–10:45, Da201.
• Instructor info Ian Barland, , Davis 230.

• Office hours: You don’t need an appointment to drop by during scheduled office hours. Note that Friday's hour is zoom-only. Any changes to these hours will be announced on the D2L discussion board.

  
  

  Mon	11:30–13:00	bit.ly/ibarland-zoom ONLY
  Tue	15:30–16:30	Da230
  Wed	14:00–15:15	Da230
  Fri	10:30–11:45	Da230
  or email me some times that work better for you (incl. weekend zoom/discord chat, possibly).

  You are encouraged to post (and answer) questions on the D2L discussion board, since you might get another student’s ideas within a few minutes, instead of my response perhaps a day or more later. If your question would require giving away part the answer (e.g. part of your solution), just email me; please include “CS380” in the subject, thanks.

• D2L and course webpage: See (and bookmark) D2L for: discussions, dropbox, quizzes, grades. This web page’s navbar links are intended for all handouts: mostly lectures and homework files. Announcements, including clarifications or changes to homeworks or course policies, will be made on the D2L discussion board; you are expected to subscribe to them ; click on the "Subscribed" star at the top of each forum.
• Textbook

  Author:	Michael Scott
  Title:	Programming Language Pragmatics
  Publisher:	Morgan Kauffman (Elsevier)
  Edition:	(see Note below)	4th ed.	3rd ed.	2nd ed.
  ISBN:		978-0-1241-0409-9	978-0-1237-4514-9	978-0-1360-7347-5
  Note:	You are welcome (even encouraged) to get a used copy the textbook. Newer editions are improvements (mostly with more examples and self-exercises), but if your budget is tight you can get an older edition.
  optional text	How well do you know Java? The following has nearly 100 one-page puzzles, each illustrating how language design choices can have unintended consequences. Fun bedtime reading. Here are 9 sample puzzlers.
  Author:	Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter
  Title:	Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases
  Publisher:	Addison Wesley
  ISBN:	978-0-3213-3678-1

• Evaluation:

  Exams (2) & Quizzes	40%
  Homeworks	60%

  In addition to these weights, your exam average must be at least 50% to pass the course.

  Final Exam: 2025-May-06 (Tue) 10:15, as per the final exam schedule. In case of inclement weather, the university may postpone the exam to Friday.

• Submission requirements:

  • Clarity counts in all work for this class (code and prose), including spelling, grammar, and layout.
  • All submitted material must contain both your name and the hw/quiz/exam-number near the top (inside the file/document).
  • Any hardcopy submitted must be stapled.
  • If something is due both on-line and hardcopy, the hardcopy must be turned in by the start of first lecture on/after the electronic deadline.

  Homeworks may be spot-graded -- some problems graded in detail, others with a cursory ✓+ / ✓ / ✓- / 0. Some problems might be auto-graded by a script (and perhaps not further examined), so be sure to use any function/program/type names specified in the homework.

  Programs will be graded not only for the extent to which they produce the required results, but also for good style. In particular, the code should be well designed, straightforward and use meaningful identifier names. Every function including helper functions should have a purpose-statement, signature, and unit tests. A program which does not compile/run might summarily get 0 points for running. Beware making a last-moment change right before submitting, without verifying that it still passes your unit tests.

• Late Policy: If you know in advance you won’t be able to turn in homework on time (e.g. military duty, or university sports) you must get permission in advance to turn the homework in late. For significant illness, quaranting, or emotional crisis without advance notice, contact the professor as soon as possible to arrange to catch up on the work, and do not access any posted solutions or discuss with others if you are planning to ask to submit late work. Include a pledge statement to that effect at the top of any submitted-late work.

• Honor Policy: As with all your RU classes, the university honor code governs all work done for the course. You are encouraged to discuss and interpret the homeworks and general approaches to solutions with your fellow students. However, you must be the direct, sole author of all your submitted work; everything submitted must come from your own head, and you should be able to explain why you solved the problem the way you did. Exams will include tasks very-similar to those in the hw, and you need 50% on the exams to pass.

  You may not:

  • You may not: receive homework code from others (electronically or otherwise), have others type in any code for you, or show your code to other students for help (except as mentioned below),
  • You may not: copy/paste code or otherwise electronically copy from any source (including AI), other than the course website (for the current semester only) and textbooks. Any old solution-sets to previous semester’s problems are off-limits, and should be mentioned to the teacher (even if anonymously).
  • You may not: allow others to copy your work (knowingly, or unknowingly due to not taking reasonable measures to secure your work — e.g. printing to a lab printer but not picking up the hardcopy promptly, or making your files readable to others on a filesystem that others have access to).
  • You may not: violate the standards of student conduct, in particular items 1–9 of Section 5D (pp.8–9).

  You may:

  • You may: ask others what a compiler message means, including (if needed) the one line causing the problem. This provision is for syntax-errors/exceptions only, not code-not-doing-what-you-want.

  • You may: Search the web/AI for solutions to small coding tasks (1–3 lines) which are not a main gist of the assignment.
    Even if finding code snippets on the web, you must type them in yourself from memory, not copy/paste them. This is to (a) help you process/think about the code you are typing, and also (b) help keep you from inadvertently copying so much that you’d violate the honor policy. If you think an exception is reasonable, check with the instructor (perhaps via the D2L discussion board).)

    For example, if the assignment is to write a CPU simulation, and happens to involve reading/writing a preferences file, you can certainly search up a sample program which opens a file, reads or writes the words "hello file", and then closes the file (catching any exceptions).

    However, if one of the assignment’s problems is to write code which copies one file to another while filtering out all punctuation, up-casing all words, and adding a "#" in front of each numeral you should not search up a program which does all/most of that. (Combining samples that do each of these independently is fine.)

  • You may: talk through a homework problem with a friend, even writing down things. However you must re-write your solution entirely on your own, without referring to any notes/files from such sessions.

    Again, the ultimate requirement is that everything you end up writing should be coming from your own understanding, (not just writing from short-term memory, what somebody else said would work).

  • You may: freely access/use all material on this course’s web pages, any textbooks, general language/library references, and web-tutorials (but only copy/pasting things from the first two of these).
  • You may: discuss/show your code with the professor, other faculty, and on-duty peer instructors. (Cite, if you feel the contribution goes beyond general, reasonable understanding.)
  • You may: ask on the course’s D2L discussion boards, asking about how to approach a problem or why you might be getting a certain error or undesired behavior. Your question may include small bits of your code (1–2 lines), but not large sections.
  • You may: omit citations for examples/code-snippets/ideas from: lectures, the course web-site for the semester, the course textbook, and official language/library documentation. (You do need to cite sources such as wikipedia, stack overflow, and help from friends.)

  If you got significant advice which you’d like to credit somebody for (e.g. a stackoverflow answer¹), cite them in your work with an inline comment which includes the URL.

  If you aren’t sure whether a certain level of help is acceptable, or feel that an exception to these rules is reasonable, stop—don’t give/receive such help until you've clarified it with the instructor. (Starting assignments early enough can give you better opportunity to get help/clarification, should it be needed.)

• Class Courtesy Please refrain from checking texts during lecture, and use a computer only for taking notes and looking up material related to or inspired by lecture (e.g. look up how foldl differs from foldr). Please do not: text, browse other sites, check social media, etc.. Other students can be distracted by your screen, and your inattentiveness diminishes the class experience overall.

• Other University Resources: Radford has many resources to help you in different ways, including the student counseling services (x5226), and the Harvey Knowledge Center (“HKC”, formerly “LARC”, x7704, radford.edu/hkc ) including access to tutorTrac.

  Students seeking academic accommodations under the Americans with Disabilities Act must register with RU's Center for Accessibility Services (CAS) in Russell Hall 301. Qualifying students should meet with me to arrange accommodations. For more information, call the CAS at 540-831-6350.

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