Topic Outline

• Formally defining practical programming languages
  • syntax
    • grammar
    • BNF
  • semantics
• Store/environments
  • single-assignment/dataflow
  • value
  • trigger
  • mutable
• Declarative kernel concepts
  • value creation
    • partial values
    • types (set of values plus set of operations)
      • basic: numbers, records, closures (procedures which may have external references)
      • dynamic type checking
  • variable creation
    • identifiers
    • static scope
  • variable-variable binding
  • empty statement
  • sequence of statements
  • conditional
  • pattern matching
  • procedure application
• Abstract machine
  • concepts:
    • environments
    • semantic statement
    • statement stack
    • execution state (env + stack)
    • computation (sequence of states)
  • program execution
  • changes to environments
  • activation condition
• Memory management
  • last call optimization (including techniques that dataflow variables offer)
  • memory life cycle/garbage collection
  • programmer responsibilities
    • avoiding memory leaks
    • managing external resources
• Translating full language to kernel language
  • syntactic conveniences
  • linguistic abstractions
  • interactive interface (declare statement)
• Exceptions
• Unification
• Declarative programming techniques
  • Recursion
    • as iteration
    • over integers, lists, and trees
    • using accumulators and invariants
    • using local procedures
    • control abstractions
    • type-directed program design
    • difference lists
  • Higher-order programming
    • Procedure abstraction and nestability
    • Genericity (passing a procedure as an argument)
      • Map, ForAll, Filter, Fold, Some/All
    • Instantiation (returning a procedure)
    • Embedding
      • explicit lazy evaluation, modules, components
  • Abstract data types
    • declarative implementation alternatives
    • security
      • wrapping/unwrapping, futures, names
    • functors
• Declarative concurrency
  • threads
  • streams
• Lazy execution (with or without concurrency)
• Soft real-time programming
• Message-passing concurrency
  • ports
  • protocols
• Explicit state (cells)
• Objects
• Relational Programming
• Specialized Computation Models