Programming Languages

This course provides an introduction to the formal semantics of programming languages: it provides tools and techniques for understanding the meaning of programs. Such tools allow us to answer questions about the correctness of programs, program analyses, and program transformations, and to understand some of the issues and complexities of programming language design. These questions and issues include the following: Are two programs indistinguishable? When I execute my program, will it encounter a run-time type error? Is it possible for a program written in this language to crash? Is this compiler optimization safe? Is programming language feature A more expressive than programming language feature B? Topics covered in this course include dynamic semantics, including operational, axiomatic, and denotational semantics; static semantics, including type systems and abstract interpretation; language features, including exceptions, mutable locations, modules, and objects. The recorded lectures are from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences course Computer Science 152. Prerequisites: CSCI E-250; CSCI E-207 is recommended. Students must have good programming skills, be comfortable with recursion, basic mathematical ideas, and notations. (4 credits)