Exam 1 Study Topics

Overview

The exam will be March 9. You will have the entire class period to work on it. It will cover Chapters 1-3 of the Sebesta text, plus material from the programming exercises and material covered in lecture that is not in the book.

Questions will be a mix of multiple choice, short answers, and problems to solve.

Topics

Evaluating Languages
- Criteria: Readability, Writability, Robustness
- Characteristics: Simplicity/orthogonality, Control structures, Data types and structures, Syntax design, Support for abstraction, Expressivity, Type checking, Exception handling, Restricted aliasing.
Executing Programs
- Direct Interpreter (shell scripts)
- Compiled Interpreter (Perl scripts)
- Virtual Machine Interpreter (Java VM)
- Hardware Interpreter (C/C++)
Developing Executable Files
- Text Editing
- Compiling
- Linking
- Loading
Syntax
- Regular Expressions
- Context Free Grammars
  - BNF and EBNF
  - Parse Trees
  - Recursive Descent Parsing
- Static Semantics
  - Attribute Grammars
Dynamic Semantics
- Operational Semantics
- Axiomatic Semantics
  - Terms: Assertions, preconditions, postconditions, weakest precondition, rule of consequence, loop invariant, total correctness, partial correctness.
- Denotational Semantics