• SI 413
• Calendar
• Classes
• Homework
• Labs
• Project
• Exams
• Other Stuff

This is the archived website of SI 413 from the Fall 2012 semester. Feel free to browse around; you may also find more recent offerings at my teaching page.

Textbooks

• Programming Language Pragmatics (PLP), by Michael L. Scott. Our main textbook.
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP), by Abelson, Sussman, and Sussman. A Scheme-centric view of programming languages, used in first-year classes at MIT. Full text available online for free - and legally!
• The Scheme Programming Language, by R. Kent Dybvig. A complete and readable Scheme reference. Also free online.
• The Python Tutorial. We'll be using Python to examine a few advanced programming features such as list comprehensions and generators. Of course this tutorial is also free online.

Software

• DrScheme version 4.2.1. You can download DrScheme here - make sure you get the right version! You will have to click through some warning that you know this is an old version of the software. You definitely don't want to download anything called "Racket". I mean it!
• The bison manual.
• The flex homepage and the flex manual.
• Python 2.6 Downloads. There are versions of Python for every operating system. If you are running Linux, it is probably already installed. Python 2.6 is the version installed in the labs, so you should use that, although 2.7.x will probably be fine as well.

The easiest way to access course software is to log in to one of the machines in our Unix lab. They all have names like

mich302csdXXu.academy.usna.edu

Logging in from a Unix of Linux-based machine

To log in from any unix or linux machine on the yard, you just need to type

ssh -Y mich302csdXXu.academy.usna.edu -l mYYYYYY

Logging in from a Windows machine

You basically have three options if you're running Windows:

1. Walk to Michelson hall and sit down in the lab. (Lab door code will be sent out by email.)
2. Install a graphical SSH client on your Windows computer. The suggested way is by first installing Xming and Xming-fonts from this website, and then installing PuTTY from this website. You run Xming to start your local X server, and then run PuTTY to connect to the remote machine. If this all sounds intimidating, try Googling something like putty xming tutorial. Just remember that your hostname will be mich302csdXXu.academy.usna.edu (for some value of XX - see above), and your username is the letter m followed by your alpha.
3. Install Linux on your machine. Any Linux distro will do; the machines in the labs are running Ubuntu, which is a pretty good choice.
   Linux can be installed within a virtual machine such as VirtualBox. To find out how to do this, Google some phrase like VirtualBox Ubuntu Windows, or ask a friend.
   Alternatively, you can install Linux in a separate partition of a dual-booted computer. You should talk to a friend (or your instructor) about how to do this.

Scheme

• The Revised⁶ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme (R6RS). The current official Scheme language standard.
• PLT Scheme v4.2.1 reference. Official documentation for the version of Scheme and the interpreter we will be using.

Other PL stuff

• Wikipedia's list of programming languages.
• 99 Bottles of Beer This Website holds a collection of the Song 99 Bottles of Beer programmed in different programming languages. Actually the song is represented in 1434 (and counting!) different programming languages and variations.
• Guts: Lexical Analysis - The Perl Journal, Fall 1998. This is a nice informal discussion of some of the complexities in Perl's lexical analyzer. The interesting thing is that lexical analysis in Perl is context dependent; so that a "{" in one place is actually a different token than a "{" in another place. Most programming languages are not written that way. In case you feel I'm short-changing parsing, how about the yacc file (bison is gnu's version of yacc) for Perl: perl.y. Notice that it makes heavy use of associativity and precedence declarations so that the grammar itself stays simple. Yacc's shift-reduce parser uses these declarations to resolve parsing "conflicts", i.e. to make the parse tree unique.
• Lambda the Ultimate. A programming languages blog.