Manifest: Thursday 25 January 2001

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

Readings

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.)

Questions

• Why should something be added to a langauge?
• What are the costs of adding something to a language?
• What do cons, car, cdr and null? do?
• How to use procedures as parameters

Method overloading (e.g MyClass.foo(String s) and MyClass.foo(int n)) is part of the AP CS subset. However, there will be no "trick questions" that test an understanding of the subtleties of the overloading resolution mechanism.

Excerpt from The Java AP CS Subset, point 16.

Students should know how to write and interpret any computable algorithm in Scheme. All questions are trick questions if you don't know the answer.

The entire proposed (but never-to-be-approved) Scheme AP CS Subset.

A final hint: listen carefully to what language users say they really want, until you have an understanding of what they really want. Then find some way of achieving the latter at a small fraction of the cost of the former.

C. A. R. Hoare, Hints on Programming Language Design, 1973.

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

David Evans evans@virginia.edu