F28PL - Programming Languages

Course leader(s):

• Swaraj Dash (Edinburgh, September)
• Mahmoud Mousa (Dubai, September)
• To be announced (Dubai, September)
• Ian Tan (Malaysia, September)

Syllabus

1. Functions and pairs (1.1 1. variable binding, 1.2 2. let-expressions, 1.3 3. tail recursion, 1.4 4. product types)

2. Lists and recursion (2.1 1. constructing and deconstructing lists, 2.2 2. recursion over lists, 2.3 3. intro to polymorphism; parametric vs. ad-hoc polymorphism, 2.4 4. lists and tail recursion)

3. Higher-order functions (3.1 1. list processing with higher-order functions, 3.2 2. using predicates for testing: property-based testing with qcheck)

4. Algebraic datatypes (4.1 1. fundamentals of type inference and polymorphism, 4.2 2. creating enumeration types, 4.3 3. writing functions on enumeration types, 4.4 4. adding parameters to our constructors , 4.5 5. recursive algebraic datatypes)

5. Exceptions and exception handling (5.1 1. built-in exceptions and evaluation model, 5.2 2. exception handling, 5.3 3. declaring your own exceptions: the extensible exn type)

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course, students should be able to do the following:

• simulate the execution of a program using a semi-formal model of computation.
• analyse a computational problem to identify its recursive structure.
• represent an interface to a data structure using an appropriate type-system.
• express aspects of the specification of a program as predicates over its input.
• design a representation of a recursive data type appropriate to the programming language used.
• implement a solution of a computational problem, relying on the representation of the underlying datatypes.

Further details

Curriculum explorer: Click here

SCQF Level: 8

Credits: 15