CS 405/505 PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES
TOPICS TO BE COVERED ON EXAM #2
November 6, 2007
The exam will cover everything we have discussed from Chapters 3 (i.e. Section 3.5), 15,
and 16 in the text and all notes, but emphasizing the material covered in class. The style of
the exam will be very flexible, possibly consisting of fill in the blank, true or false (possibly with
justification), multiple choice, matching, short answer (e.g. definitions or listing), and discussion
questions. You will not be asked to work detailed problems such as writing any actual code (i.e.
code in a specific language like Lisp or Prolog) You should have some ideas about the theory
behind implementation of programming languages (e.g. the relationship between formal models of
computation and programming languages, λ-calculus etc.). Some smaller problems such as drawing
a Lisp representation of a list, or tracing the execution of a Prolog program, are likely.
A brief outline of the topics we have covered is described below. (This list is intended to be
as complete as possible but may not be all inclusive.)
•Programming Languages - Semantics. Of the three formal methods, operational, denotational
and axiomatic, we concentrated on denotational and axiomatic. You should know the goals
of formal semantics and should have specific ideas about how denotational semantics may
model interpretation of programs and how axiomatic semantics may be used to prove the
partial correctness of a program. You need not remember any specific denotational semantics
equations or axiomatic rules per se but should know enough about them to be able to explain
or use them if they are given to you. You should know the purpose and principles behind
axiomatic semantics but need not know the details of any axiomatic semantics rules.
•Functional Programming Languages. Lambda calculus was introduced as the foundation of
denotational semantics and functional programming. The LISP, ML and Haskell program-
ming languages were discussed as examples of the functional language paradigm. You should
know the general design philosophy and syntactic and semantic flavor. You do NOT need to
know specific commands in detail, but should know some basic ones from LISP (e.g. defun,
cond,eq,setq,cons,car,cdr,append,list). Examples of the most detailed information
of a fundamental nature you should know would be how functions are defined, how lists are
represented internally, and how functions may be manipulated as data.
•Logic Programming. You should know the general design philosophy and syntactic and se-
mantic flavor of Prolog. You do NOT need to know specific commands. Examples of the
most detailed information of a fundamental nature you should know would be how the rule
matching works (e.g. execution of rules, instantiation of variables, backtracking, etc.) and
the representation of lists.
