COMS W4115 Programming Languages and Translators Summer 2013 (CVN)

Lectures

Class meets three times a week on CVN.

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
May 22	1, 2	Intro. to Languages		Ch 1, 2
May 24	2	The C Language Reference Manual
May 29	3	Introduction to O'Caml
May 31	4	"
Jun 3	5	"
Jun 5	6	Language Processors		Ch. 2
Jun 7	7	Syntax and Parsing		Ch. 3, 4	Proposal
Jun 10	8	"
Jun 12	9	"
Jun 14	10	Getting it right
Jun 17	11	Guest Lecture: Al Aho on Awk			HW1
Jun 19	12	Ocamlyacc and ASTs
Jun 21	13 12 13 14	Homework 1 solutions Names, Scope and Bindings		Ch. 6
Jun 24	14 17 18	The MicroC Compiler		App. A
Jun 26	15 15	Homework 2 solutions Midterm Review			HW2
Jun 28					LRM
Jul 1		Midterm
Jul 3	16 16	Midterm solutions Types		Ch. 6
Jul 8	17	"
Jul 10	18	"
Jul 12	19	Control-flow		Ch. 6
Jul 15	20	Code Generation		Ch. 6, 7, 8
Jul 17	21	Logic Programming
Jul 19	21 22	The Lambda Calculus			HW3
Jul 22	23 23	Homework 3 solutions Parallel Programming on OpenMP and Java
Jul 24	24	Final Review
Jul 26
Jul 31		Final Exam
Aug 16		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.
	Jason Hickey, Introduction to Objective Caml. One of my favorite books on O'Caml.
	Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury, and Bruno Pagano, Developing Applications with Objective Caml. An online book translated from the French (O'Reilly).
	Objective CAML Tutorial
	O'Caml source for the four-function calculator.
	O'Caml source and test cases for the microc language.

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 ANTLR-generated files, only the .g 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.
	A sample final report by Chris Conway, Cheng-Hong Li, and Megan Pengelly. It includes the white paper, tutorial, language reference manual, project plan, architectural design, and testing plan. It does not include the lessons learned and code listings sections, although it should.

White Papers

	The Java white paper from Sun Microsystems
	C# Introduction and Overview

Language Reference Manuals

	Dennis M. Ritchie, C Reference Manual
	Kernighan & Ritchie, The C Programming Language
	The C Language Reference Manual (DEC)
	The C Language Reference Manual (SGI)
	The C Language Reference Manual (Microsoft)
	Stroustrup, The C++ Programming Language
	The Java Language Specification
	The C# Language Specification
	Aho, Kernighan, and Weinberger, The AWK Programming Language

Projects

IF: Interactive Fiction Language Proposal LRM Final Report Gema Almoguera

SIP: Simple Image Processing Language Proposal LRM Final Report Project Files Emad Barsoum

bawk: AWK for Binary Files LRM Final Report Project Files Kevin Graney

Pts: Point Animation Language Proposal LRM Final Report Project Files Michael Johns

LEARN: Language for Exercise and Response Notification Proposal LRM Final Report Project Files Jairo Pava

MEL: Mathematical Expression Language Proposal LRM Final Report Project Files Manjiri Phadke, and Paresh Thatte

BoredGame: Board Game Language Proposal Final Report Project Files Shant Stepanian

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.

Other

CVN faculty center