ITEC 380: Exam 1 topics - Fall 2010

1. Announcement: Chapter 4 will NOT be on this exam


2. Topics
1. Through week 6
2. Chapters 16, 1, 2, 3 (Semantics not included)
3. Lecture and notes, supplemented by text
4. Homework


3. Chapter 1: Introductory Material
   1. Evaluation criteria and language characteristics: describe how characteristics influcence criteria and give some examples using common languages
   
   
   2. von Neumann architecture: describe it and its influence on programming languages
   
   
   3. Evolution of imperative languages: list and describe the basic mechanisms for control and data abstraction
   
   
   4. Language paradigms: list, describe fundamental characteristics, give example languages
   
   
   5. Programming domains: describe programming language features that support various common programming domains
   
   
   6. Compilation and interpretation: describe and distinguish between, give examples of languages that use each, compare hardware and software interpretation
   
   
   7. Syntax vs Semantics: describe each and distinguish between
   
   
   8. Compiler phases (and symbol table): diagram phases showing relationships among them and inputs and outputs of each
   
   
4. Chapter 2: Evolution of Major Languages
1. Church's thesis:
• Turing machine: informally define
• Church's thesis: define and describe relevance
• Turing complete: define, describe relevance


2. Periods: Dominant themes and major languages and their characteristics
   
3. Important languages - when developed, major characteristics, why important
• Late 1940's and Early 1950's: programming before high level languages
• Late 1950's: FORTRAN and LISP
• Early 1960's: COBOL, ALGOL, BASIC
• Later 1960's: PL/1, SIMULA
• 1970's: Pascal, Modula2, C, PROLOG, Smalltalk
• 1980's: Ada, C++, Eiffel
• 1990's: Ada95, Java, Scripting (Perl, python, ruby, tcl, vbscript, javascript)
• 2000's: Scripting, C#, .NET, Ada 2005
• 2010's: ???, Ada 2012


5. Chapter 3: Grammars (Semantics not included)
• Fundamental concepts:
• Describe relation between grammars, valid programs, program structure, and programming language syntax
• Recognize parts of a grammar and define terms (eg variables and terminals, start symbol, productions)
• Define Backus Normal Form (BNF) and Context Free Grammar (CFG)
• Describe the relation between CFG and Programming Languages


• Derivations and Parse Trees
• Write a derivation of a string
• Left/Rightmost derivations: define and create
• Parse tree (abstract and concrete): define and create
• Describe relation between derivation and parse tree


• Determine and describe the strings produced by a grammar


• Write grammar to define a given language (using recursive productions as needed)


• Write and interpret grammars for programming common language constructs (eg programs, statements, if-then, assignment, expressions)


• Expression grammars:
• Give and interpret ambiguous and unambiguous expression grammars
• Write an unambiguous expression grammar with desired precedence and associativity


• Ambiguous grammars:
• Define
• Prove that a grammar is ambiguous
• Describe ambiguous if problem and its solutions


• EBNF
• List and define EBNF notation: (|), [], {}
• Interpret EBNF descriptions
• Distinguish between language and metalanguage in EBNF descriptions
• Express common programming language structure using EBNF




6. Chapter 16: PROLOG
   1. As covered in class
   2. Process of execution/pattern matching
   3. Facts, rules, predecates, queries
   4. Recognize, interpret and describe basic language concepts:
   • Variables (use good names)
   • If then
   • And, or
   • Arithmetic
   5. Lists
   1. Common functions (eg member, append, length): interpret and write
   2. Special notation [ H | T ]: interpret and use
   3. Instantiating lists: interpret and write predicates and queries involving list
   6. Write recursive predicates with a base case
   7. Determine values taken by variables when matching queries with facts and rules
   8. Write predicates to accomplish a task, including list processing
7. Update (10/18) on exam content (approximate):
• Grammars,etc: 50 points
• Prolog: 25 points
• Chapters 1 and 2: 25 points