Contents Overview

This course is about the common principles of high-level programming languages. By studying these concepts the participants shall be able to faster learn and assess new languages.

After a brief sketch of the history of programming languages we describe major concepts of programming languages:

Values: data structures and expressions
Storage: variables and commandle
Binding: declarations and blocks
Abstraction: procedures, functions, and parameter passing

Encapsulation: packages, interfaces, objects, classes, and generic parameters
Type systems: overloading, polymorphisms, and inheritance
Control flow: jumps and exceptions
Concurrency: processes and communication

It is always the semantics and pragmatics (i.e. meaning and purpose) of the concepts that is in focus here; their syntax is considered a secondary issue. The concepts are described in a few reference languages (Ada, Java, Eiffel, Haskell, Standard ML, Prolog). The comparison of programming languages reveals some principles of good language design.

Then we consider how concepts are selected and combined to support important styles, or paradigma, of programming, and illustrate this with typical languages:

imperative programming (Ada)
object-orientiertes programming (Java, Eiffel)
functional programming (Standard ML, Haskell)
logic programming (Prolog)

Exercises

For one hour a week approximately, the participants shall reinforce their understanding by doing (unmarked) exercises. Questions to the reference languages (Ada, Java, Eiffel Standard ML, Haskell, Prolog) shall be answered in small assignments. This can be done by studying the description of a language, or by producing test programs for its reference installations.

Author: Dr. Berthold Hoffmann

Group BKB

Last updated: April 7, 2010