This is my second post on UMD CS’s programming languages course, CS 330.
We introduce Ruby and OCaml as exemplars of dynamic/scripting and functional languages, respectively, in the first half of the course. I described these in the first post. This post covers the third quarter of the course. This part goes over technologies that underpin a language’s design and implementation, in particular regular expressions, finite automata, context-free grammars, and LL-k parsing. It also looks at the lambda calculus as a core model of computation, and operational semantics as way of precisely specifying what programs mean. The last part of the course discusses the basics of software security and coding strategies for avoiding various vulnerabilities. I will dedicate a separate post to these last topics.
I’m very curious for your feedback on the course overall. I welcome suggestions for improvements/adjustments to the content!