
	COMS W4115 Programming Languages and Translators Spring 2021

Lectures

Class meets Mondays and Wednesdays 5:40 - 6:55 PM Online.

Staff

Name	Email	Office hours	Location
Prof. Stephen A. Edwards	sedwards@cs.columbia.edu	see Courseworks	Online
Wonhyuk Choi	wc2737@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online
Evan Mesterhazy	etm2131@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online
Hans Montero	hjm2133@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online
Dipankar Niranjan	dipankar.n@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online
Jianan Yao	jy3022@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online
Xijiao Li	xl2950@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online
Arjun Ahua	aa4664@columbia.edu	See Courseworks	Online

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 team 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 Computer Science Theory: 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
Mon Jan 11	1 1	Intro. to Languages (annotated)	Ch 1, 2
Wed Jan 13	2 2	Language Processors (annotated)	Ch. 2
Mon Jan 18		MLK Holiday
Wed Jan 20	3	Some Outstanding Projects
Mon Jan 25	4 4	Programming in OCaml (annotated)
Wed Jan 27	5	"
Mon Feb 1	6	"
Wed Feb 3	7	"		Proposal
Mon Feb 8	8 8	Syntax and Parsing (annotated)	Ch. 3, 4
Wed Feb 10	9	"		HW1 .tar.gz file
Mon Feb 15	10	"
Wed Feb 17	11	"
Mon Feb 22	11	"
Wed Feb 24	11	"		LRM, Parser
Mon Mar 1		Spring Break
Mon Mar 8	11	"
Wed Mar 10	12 12	The MicroC Compiler (annotated)	App. A
Fri Mar 12		(no lecture; turn in homework)		HW2 p1 p2 p3
Mon Mar 15	16	MicroC contd.
Wed Mar 17	17	"
Mon Mar 22	18	"
Wed Mar 24	19	"		Hello World
Mon Mar 29	20	"
Wed Mar 31	21 21	Runtime Environments (annotated)	Ch. 7
Mon Apr 5	22	"
Wed Apr 7	23 23	The Lambda Calculus (annotated)
Mon Apr 12	24	"
Wed Apr 14	25 25	Review for Final Coversheet for Final		HW3
Fri Apr 16		Final Exam
Mon Apr 26		Project Reports Due

Suggested 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.
	OCaml books, many available for free online
	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.

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

	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

AHOD: AllHandsOnDeck: Card game language (XL)