Manifest: Tuesday 23 January 2001

Assignments
Thursday, 1 February (in class)	Problem Set 1

Readings

Read before 25 January:

• (essential) Abelson and Sussman, Section 1.3.
• (essential) Richard Kelsey, et. al., Revised⁵ Report on the Algorithmic Language Scheme, 1998. Don't worry if you can't make any sense out of section 7.2, but do try to read it. We will read this again after covering the tools it uses.
• (essential) Abelson and Sussman, Foreward by Alan Perlis.

Read before 30 January:

• (essential) Abelson and Sussman, Chapter 4. (Note that we are skipping chapters 2 and 3. I believe Chapter 4 is comprehensible without these, but depending on your background you may find it necessary to read parts of Chapters 2 and 3.)

Links

• Hopcroft & Ulman's Universal Turing Machine
• Dial-A-Curry, Chicken Curry recipe, the real Haskell Curry
• If you don't like all those lambdas, try The Unlambda Programming Language.
• Story behind Backus Naur Form

Questions

• What does it mean for something to be computable?
• What is a Universal Programming Language?
• How can you prove a programming language is Universal?
• What are the elements of a language?
• What are the elements of Scheme? Which of them are really necessary?
• How does one determine the meaning of a Scheme program?

"Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas - only I don't exactly know what they are!"
Alice, in Alice and Wonderland by Lewis Carroll after hearing The Jaberwocky.

The best book on programming for the layman is Alice in Wonderland; but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
Alan Perlis (first Turing Award winner)

University of Virginia Department of Computer Science CS 655: Programming Languages

David Evans evans@virginia.edu