Concepts of Programming Languages

The design of a programming language is determined by a selection from a general collection of programming language concepts. With some frequency, new languages are introduced that combine those concepts in a novel manner, sometimes introducing new concepts. A computer science student will have to work with multiple generations of programming languages during his/her career. In order to learn a new language, student should understand the basic principles in the design of programming languages and analyse languages in terms of those principles. In this course, we study those basic principles by examining three concrete programming languages: Scala, C, and JavaScript.

Note: In 2013-2014 the course is only given as a repeat for students who did not pass the course in 2012-2013. There will be no lectures. The lab is offered in Quarter 3 with teaching assistants. There will be two opportunities to take the exam. A new version of this course will be offered in 2014-2015 as a second year bachelor computer science course.