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Advances in Programming Languages

2007–2008

Note: This page refers to a past version of the course. You can also consult the current APL course web pages.

This is a level 10 course in the School of Informatics, suitable for 4th year undergraduate students. The course surveys recent developments in programming language design and implementation with an emphasis on technological advances on the state-of-the-art. For further details see the course descriptor.

Links: Exam; Coursework; Appleton Tower closures

Lectures: Mondays and Thursdays at 9am during Semester 2, in room 4.01 of the David Hume Tower.

• Lecture 1: What's so important about language?
• Lecture 2: Some types and a little OCaml
• Lecture 3: Row variables in OCaml

• Lecture 4: Coursework assignment

• Lecture 5: Hoare logic
• Lecture 6: JML — The Java Modeling Language
• Lecture 7: ESC/Java 2

• Lecture 8: Spec# (Video, Rustan Leino)

• Lecture 9: Domain-Specific Languages
• Lecture 10: Bridging Query and Programming Languages
• Lecture 11: Heterogeneous Metaprogramming in F#

• Lecture 12: Polymorphic Typing of Units of Measure in F#
  Guest lecture by Andrew Kennedy visiting from Microsoft Research Cambridge

• Lecture 13: Programming-Language Techniques for Concurrency — Java, Erlang
• Lecture 14: Polyphonic C#
• Lecture 15: Cautionary Tales in Concurrency

• Lecture 16: Programming the Cell Processor with Sieve C++
  Guest lecture by Alastair Donaldson from Codeplay Software

• Lecture 17: Safer C Programming with Cyclone

• Lecture 18: Course Review

The lecture log provides more details, homework exercises and references.

Coursework: There is a single piece of assessed coursework, a written report on one of five programming language topics. Further details are available on the coursework web page.

Newsgroup: The course has a newsgroup eduni.inf.course.apl available from the server newsread.ed.ac.uk. You should read this regularly.

The newsgroup carries announcements about lecture content, updates to the web page, homework, and coursework. You can also ask questions about the course, and respond to the questions of others.

Many email clients can read newsgroups; there are also specialised news clients. For more information about newsgroups, see the Informatics page about USENET and the University guide to the news service.

To use the news server from outwith the University network you must arrange appropriate secure access. The Informatics support page gives three different solutions. One is to set up a VPN, so that your own machine is networkologically within the University. This will also give you access to internal-only web pages, and subscriptions to online research resources paid for by the University Library. Both Information Services and the Student Helpdesk have guides on how to arrange the VPN.

A word of warning: if you connect your machine through a VPN, then it will at once be visible to all others on the University network. Before doing so, you should check that you have a suitable firewall running, as the VPN will bypass any external firewall such as a broadband router.

Contact: The course lecturer is Ian Stark.