On this page:
1 Introduction
2 Meetings
3 Turn In Policy
4 Paper Review Format
5 Discussion Review Format
6 Exams
7 Grading
8 Your Final Grade

Advanced Programming Languages (Spring 2013)

This class is taught by Jay McCarthy.

We meet in 134 TMCB at TR 08:00-10:45.

Jay McCarthy’s office hours are 6am to 11am M-F in 3328 TMCB.

1 Introduction

This course covers advanced programming language topics.

This year’s theme is macro systems.

This course will be structured as follows: each day we’ll hear presentations on a paper from a student; before the meeting every student will turn in a review of the paper; after the meeting every student will turn in a summary of the discussion. If a paper is particularly confusing, I’ll take the time to go over some of the necessary theory. The presenter should consult with me to design their presentations.

2 Meetings

 

Date

 

Paper

 

Presenter

 

04/30

 

Macro System Introduction & Tutorial

 

Neil & Blake

 

05/02

 

Hygienic Macro Expansion (1986), Syntactic Extensions in the Programming Language Lisp (1986) and Macro-by-example: Deriving syntactic transformations from their specifications (1987)

 

Blake

 

05/07

 

Expansion-Passing Style: A General Macro Mechanism (1988) and Syntactic Closures (1988)

 

Andrew

 

05/09

 

Macros that work (1991) and Writing Hygenic Macros in Scheme with Syntax-Case (1992)

 

Matthew

 

05/14

 

Attend TFP 2013

 

 

05/16

 

Attend TFP 2013

 

 

05/21

 

On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages (1991)

 

Jay

 

05/23

 

Composable and Compilable Macros (2002)

 

Blake

 

05/28

 

How to Write Seemingly Unhygienic and Referentially Opaque Macros with Syntax-rules (2002) and A Few Principles of Macro Design (2008)

 

Jay

 

05/30

 

Taming Macros (2004)

 

Andrew

 

06/04

 

Debugging Hygienic Macros (2009) and Fortifying Macros (2010)

 

Matthew

 

06/06

 

Languages as Libraries (2011)

 

Andrew

 

06/11

 

Macros that Work Together: Compile-Time Bindings, Partial Expansion, and Definition Contexts (2012)

 

Kimball

 

06/13

 

Honu: Syntactic Extension for Algebraic Notation through Enforestation (2012)

 

Matthew

This schedule may change.

3 Turn In Policy

Reviews are to be emailed to byu-cs-630-spring-2013@googlegroups.com. You must also subscribe to this mailing list by going to http://groups.google.com/group/byu-cs-630-spring-2013.

Paper reviews are due by 5pm the day before the meeting. Discussion reviews are due by 5pm the day after the meeting.

The subject line must be: "BYU - Spring 2013 - CS 630 - date - kind", where date is the date of the meeting and kind is either Paper or Discussion.

Only one email should be sent. If more than one is sent, I will grade the oldest one.

The only file formats that will be accepted are inline text.

Reviews that do not have the correct format will receive no credit.

4 Paper Review Format

Your review should summarize the paper, identify its primary contributions, describe something you understood well, and describe something you had a hard time understanding. You should plan on writing approximately a page and a half of prose.

5 Discussion Review Format

Your review should summarize the discussion, identify the main things you learned from it and/or thought deeply about, and describe what lingering questions (if any) you still have about the material. You should plan on writing approximately a page and a half of prose.

6 Exams

There are no exams in this course.

7 Grading

Each review is graded with a number between 0 and 1.

8 Your Final Grade

Your final numeric grade is the average of the reviews due.

I will then run the following function to convert it to a letter:

> (define (convert-to-letter ng)
    (cond
      [(> ng 0.93) "A"]
      [(> ng 0.9) "A-"]
      [(> ng 0.86) "B+"]
      [(> ng 0.83) "B"]
      [(> ng 0.8) "B-"]
      [(> ng 0.76) "C+"]
      [(> ng 0.73) "C"]
      [(> ng 0.7) "C-"]
      [(> ng 0.66) "D+"]
      [(> ng 0.63) "D"]
      [(> ng 0.6) "D-"]
      [else "F"]))

Examples:

> (convert-to-letter 1)

"A"

> (convert-to-letter 0.94)

"A"

> (convert-to-letter 0.899999)

"B+"

> (convert-to-letter 0.81)

"B-"

> (convert-to-letter 0.74)

"C"

> (convert-to-letter 0.6999999)

"D+"

> (convert-to-letter 0.62)

"D-"

> (convert-to-letter 0.57)

"F"