Study guide for the Programming Languages Comprehensive Examination

Topics

• Programming paradigms
  • Imperative
  • Functional: higher-order functions
  • Logic: resolution, unification
• Object-oriented programming: inheritance, subtyping
• Language syntax
  • Meta language, object language
  • Regular expressions
  • Context free grammars and Backus-Naur form
  • Parse trees, abstract syntax trees, syntax graphs
  • Ambiguous grammars
  • Parsing, recursive descent parsing
  • [Attribute grammars, deprecated]
• Basic semantics
  • Attributes, binding, and semantic functions
  • Declarations, blocks, and scope
  • Allocation, extent, and the environment
  • Problems with aliasing and pointers
• Types
  • integers, floating point, IEEE 754, records, etc
  • type insecurities, type checking, type inference
  • type equivalence
  • abstract data types and modularity
• Polymorphism
  • ad hoc: overloading, implicit coercion
  • universal: parametric, subtype
• Control
  • loops
  • procedures and parameters
  • procedure closures, non-local variable access
  • exception handling
• Semantics: operational, denotational, axiomatic (only superficial knowledge)

Pay special attention to the two other paradigms: functional programming (especially ML) and logic programming (PROLOG). The chapter each in Sebesta is not enough.

References

The primary references are:

• Robert W. Sebesta.Concepts of Programming Languages, fifth edition.
  Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 2002. ISBN: 0-201-75295-6.

  All chapters, except Chapter 11: Concurrency.

• Webber, Adam Brooks. Modern Programming Languages: A Practical Introduction.
  Franklin, Beedle & Associates, 2003. ISBN: 1-887902-76-7
• Mitchell, John Clifford. Concepts of Programming Languages Introduction.
  Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN: 0-521-78098-5

Other roughly equivalent textbooks exist:

• Louden. Programming Languages, Principles and Practice
• Scott. Programming Language Pragmatics
• Sethi. Programming Languages, Concepts and Constructs
• MacClennan. Principles of Programming Languages