Programming Languages Ⅰ (Coursera)

Programming Languages Ⅰ (Coursera)

The goal of this course is to help students: learn new languages quickly; evaluate various languages and pick the most suitable one for a given task; know when and how to design a little language, and; understand the effects of languages on thought and communication.

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We will study programming language concepts, not as paradigms but as a set of basic building blocks, by 1) implementing interpreters for the concepts using the Scala programming language and 2) rigorously discussing the concepts using the operational semantics.

Syllabus

WEEK 1: Programming Languages: Syntax and Semantics
WEEK 2: Programming Languages with Identifiers
WEEK 3: First-Order Functions and First-Class Functions
WEEK 4: Lambda Calculus and Recursive Functions
WEEK 5: Mutable Data Structures and Variables
WEEK 6: Garbage Collection and Lazy Evaluation
WEEK 7: Final Exam

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