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News and changes

2024-01-08

Fixed errors in Jan 2023 exam solution (Q2 automata and Q4 evaluation of if).

2023-10-31

The lecture hall HC2 of todays's lecture has only 104 seats. Thus, I will offer streaming of this lecture via Zoom (hybrid format). You are welcome to join via Zoom in case you cannot or do not want to attend in person (e.g. if you shy crowds these days, or have symptoms etc). Zoom link will be published via Canvas.

Schedule

Lectures are Tuesdays and Thursdays, starting at 13:15, both on campus and in Zoom. Tuesday lectures are in HC2, Thursday lectures in SB-H6, with exceptions Thu 2nd Nov and 23rd Nov in SB-H5.

Material: plt = course book, dragon = Dragon book. Slides follow closely the plt book.

The official course schema is in Time Edit.

Description

The aim of the course is to give understanding of how programming languages are designed, documented, and implemented. The course covers the basic techniques and tools needed to write interpreters, and gives a summary introduction to compilation as well. Those who have passed the course should be able to

1. define the lexical structure of programming languages by using regular expressions, explain the functioning of finite automata, and implement lexical analysers by using standard tools;
2. define the syntax of programming languages by using context-free grammars, explain the principles of LL and LR parsing, and implement parsers by using standard tools;
3. define and implement abstract syntax;
4. master the technique of syntax-directed translation and its efficient implementation in their chosen programming language;
5. formulate typing rules and implement type checkers;
6. formulate operational semantic rules and implement interpreters;
7. write simple code generators;
8. be familiar with the basic implementation issues of both imperative and functional languages;
9. master the principles of polymorphic type checking by unification;
10. implement an interpreter for a functional language.

Teachers

Andreas Abel, responsible course teacher and examiner.

Assistants:

• Andras Kovacs
• Eric Olsson
• Felix Cherubini
• Hao Hu haohu student chalmers se (insert @ and .)
• Jonas Höfer
  Questions regarding this class (organization, content, labs) should be asked publicly on the Canvas forum in the most cases. You are also welcome to answer questions by others. (Don't give away any lab solutions when you ask or answer questions!)

Lab times and supervision

Lab supervision is available in room ED3354 and online on Tue, Thu and Fri.

The lab rooms and supervision are available from Tue 31 Oct till Fri 15 Dec 2023, except for Fri 03 Nov which is a half-day. Starting 08 Nov we offer Zoom supervision on Wednesdays 15:15-17:00, please use the slack channel #queue to queue for Zoom supervision during that time.

We use Slack to organize the lab supervision. Please join our Slack workspace.

The TAs will be present in lab rooms during lab supervision slots, available for help both in-person and virtually. To ask for help, just send a ticket request through the #queue Slack channel.

• For in-person attendance, writing your names is sufficient.
• For online help, start a Zoom meeting and invite your group partner to join. Please then sign up by providing a clickable URL to your Zoom meeting (e.g., https://chalmers.zoom.us/j/6435657890/pwd=OXlBcGxMZjkzNGsyplpYZENYWlVodi09), so that the TA knows where to find you.
• Monitor the queue, the TA will join you/your Zoom meeting as soon as it’s your turn.

You are expected to find a lab partner, with whom you will do the labs. If you have difficulties finding a partner, please use Slack channel #lab-partner.

Labs

You have to pass the labs to pass the course. However, the course grade is determined solely by the exam.

• Lab 1 - parser (deadline 13/11)
• Lab 2 - type checker and interpreter (deadline 27/11)
• Lab 3 - code generator (deadline 13/12)
• Lab 4 - functional language interpreter (deadline 08/01/2024)

The labs are quite substantial, so please set aside at least 30 full working hours (4 full working days) before the deadline. It is recommended to start at least 10 days before the deadline.

Labs are to be solved in groups of two. (Individual solutions are accepted per exception, please contact the course responsible.) Groups are formed on Canvas and then recreated automatically on Chalmers GitLab. After the first lab has been submitted, the groups are fixed. (Should you nevertheless need to urgently change to group, please contact the course responsible.)

The labs will be published in your Gitlab group and a solution repository will be created for you there. Submission of your solution is by creating a submission tag in the repository. Please read the detailed lab instructions at: https://chalmers.instructure.com/courses/26247/pages/lab-infrastructure-on-chalmers-gitlab

Keep your lab solutions confidential! If you post problems and discussions around the labs on Canvas etc., make sure you do not give away the solution.

We guarantee two gradings per lab: one for the version submitted before the ordinary deadline for that lab, the other for a resubmission before the final deadline. If your first submission does not build or does not pass the testsuite, you will just get fails testsuite as grading.

As part of the grading, you may be asked to explain your solution in person to a course teacher. Be prepared to get a call for such an explanation meeting. In particular, make sure you understand all parts of the solution (good documentation helps!).

Exam

The written exam determines the course grade, the usual grading scales apply: Chalmers: 5, 4, 3, U; Gothenburg University: VG, G, U.

Exam dates: 11 Jan 2024 am J, 04 Apr 2024 am J, 29 Aug 2024 pm J.

The exam tests the understanding of the course contents from a more high-level view, e.g., the underlying theoretical concepts. The exam has the same structure as these old exams (download as archive).

Further, here are some old exercises and solutions to prepare for the exam.

Literature

The main book will be one that developed from earlier editions of this course:

Aarne Ranta

Implementing Programming Languages. An Introduction to Compilers and Interpreters, College Publications, London, 2012. Web page (with extra material and links to selling sites)

Please also check the errata page (welcome to submit errata not covered there yet).

If you are really interested in the topic, for instance, if you want to continue with the Compiler Construction course, you should also consider the Dragon book,

Aho, Lam, Sethi & Ullman

Compilers Principles, Techniques & Tools, Second edition, Pearson/Addison Wesley 2007.

Both books are available at web bookshops. The main book will also be sold at Cremona.

A good (yet slightly dated) introduction to monads in Haskell, useful for implementing interpreters, type checkers, and compilers, is this article:

Philip Wadler

Monads for functional programming. In Advanced Functional Programming, First International Spring School on Advanced Functional Programming Techniques, Båstad, Sweden, May 24-30, 1995.

It also contains an introduction to parser combinators.

Software

If you are solving the labs on your own Windows machine, you might have to obtain some command-line developer tools stemming from the Unix world, like make, tar, etc. (These are by default available on Linux and can be installed from Xcode on macOS.) Windows from version 10 offers installation of a Linux distro via the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). Another popular option is MSYS2 which is also bundeled with Haskell stack.

BNFC

We use the BNF Converter (Homepage | Hackage | Stackage | GitHub) in version 2.8.4 or above. Download and installation instructions at https://bnfc.digitalgrammars.com/.

When using the Java backend, you will need either ANTLR or the CUP libraries and either JFLex or the JLex libraries. CUP has seen incompatible changes in its interface; thus, the version you need may depend on your BNFC version.

Java/CUP Instructions for BNFC ≥ 2.8.2 (uses CUP v0.11b)

Download the JAVA archives for CUP v11b, CUP v11b runtime, and JLex. Make sure they are placed in your classpath, for example (Linux / macOS) by storing these jars in $HOME/java-lib/ and adding the following line (or a suitable variant) to .bashrc (could also be .bash_profile or similar):

    export CLASSPATH=.:${HOME}/java-lib/java-cup-11b.jar:${HOME}/java-lib/java-cup-11b-runtime.jar:${HOME}/java-lib/JLex-1.2.6.jar:${CLASSPATH}

Student representatives

Student representatives for DAT151 Programming language technology.