CM20214/CM20221: Advanced Programming Principles

End of Unit

These units have now been retired. Their content will be found in other units, such as CM20252 Artificial intelligence; CM20253 Comparative Programming Languages; CM20256 Functional programming; and others

Running Lisp

Here are some basic instructions on how to run Lisp on the BUCS lcpu machines

A very quick introduction to Lisp

Unit Catalogue

CM20221

Some texts

Lisp has been about since 1957, so there's been plenty of books written, some of them good. The only thing to bear in mind is that each book tends to be written for a particular variety of Lisp, so the details might vary.

Books I like include

• "The Little Lisper" Friedman and Felleisen
• "The Little Schemer" Friedman and Felleisen
• "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" Abelson and Sussman. Probably ought to be read by all Computer Scientists whether they are interested in Lisp or not. (Video lectures)
• "Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Approach" Paepcke
• "The Art of the Metaobject Protocol" Kiczales et al

Again, very many texts out there. It's mostly a matter of personal choice of a book that suits you.

• "Understanding Algorithms and Datastructures" Brunskill and Turner. Uses C and Ada
• "Algorithms in C" Sedgewick
• "Analysis of Algorithms and Data Structures" Banachowski, Kreczmar and Rytter. For the mathematical
• "Introduction to the Design and Analysis of Algorithms" Levitin. Looks OK
• "Data Structures, Algorithms & Software Principles in C" Standish.

Some links

• Relative popularity of various languages in the real world
• C is more subtle than you think. Try this Quiz about integers in C
• Functional Programming on Wikipedia
• List of functional languages
• Functional Programming For The Rest of Us from a Java perspective
• History of Lisp by John McCarthy
• History of Lisp by Herbert Stoyan
• The Evolution of Lisp by Steele and Gabriel
• Common Lisp
• Practical Common Lisp online book
• R6RS Scheme
• MIT Scheme
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs full text
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
• EuLisp
• ISLisp
• Euscheme, a EuLisp implementation
• EuScheme Notes
• Some EuLisp implementations (2011)
• Xlisp, a Scheme implementation
• Clisp, a Common Lisp implementation
• Common Lisp Specification
• Clojure a Lisp that runs on top of the Java virtual machine; WikiBook. Clojure has many gratuitous syntactic differences with other Lisps and several semantic differences as a consequence of using the JVM
• Hyperpolyglot comparison of Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure and Emacs Lisp
• Haddocks' Eyes, with some explanation
• The Funarg problem
• Technical Issues of Separation in Function Cells and Value Cells Lisp-1 vs Lisp-2
• Boehm garbage collector for C and C++. This contains several links to GC literature
• Visualizing Garbage Collection Algorithms
• Glasgow Haskell Compiler; ghc and ghci interactive r-e-p loop
• Wikibook on Haskell
• Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!
• Scala an OO functional language that uses the Java virtual machine
• Curry-Howard Isomorphism
• Erlang Practical functional
• Rust A post-C language
• Go A post-C language
• Lua Scripting, procedural, functional, bytecode
• OCaml Functional (and imperative and OO)
• Glib reference manual
• List of common algorithms
• List of string matching algorithms
• C Right-Left Rule for deciphering C declarations
• The C Object System: Using C as a High-Level Object-Oriented Language
• Compiler error messages from the Apple MPW C compiler
• Ten Things I Hate About Object-Oriented Programming
• C++ as a Multiparadigm Language including reflections on why OO is not a panacea
• Go and Rust - objects without class
• Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII)
• Clever Algorithms Nature-Inspired Programming Recipes
• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
• Valgrind
• AddressSanitizer a fast memory error detector (currently only using Clang)
• Banks will stick with COBOL because Java has performance issues
• What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
• Facebook's New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding using Haskell
• Rosetta Code solutions to tasks in many languages
• Use after free and dangling pointers
• The worst mistake of computer science about how NULL is a big problem

Running Lisp and Haskell

Scheme

~masrjb/bin/xlisp

Euscheme

~masrjb/bin/euscheme

CLisp

~masrjb/bin/clisp

Clojure

~masrjb/bin/clojure

Haskell

~masrjb/bin/hugs

Most of the above are open source and may well run on other operating systems. As Year 2 Students you should have no trouble finding the sources and getting them to run.

There is even a repository of EuLisp implementations. A version of EuScheme, renamed EuXlisp, is provided.

Lisp Exercises

99 Lisp problems (for the keen student).

Online Past Papers

Past papers

The CM20221 exam content is identical.

This is a relatively new course that combines elements from several previous courses:

• CM20029/COMP0029: Applications IV: compilers
• CM10138/COMP0138: Systems II: programming & C
• CM20167/COMP0167: Programming III: functional programming
• CM20168/COMP0168: Programming Languages IV
• C7: Programming in Lisp
• Math0071: Applications of Logic

Coursework

CM20214 The first coursework will be worth 10% and the second 20%. Another 10% will come from part of the Integrative Project.

CM20221 Each coursework will be worth 20%. Coursework 1 for CM20221 will be larger than that for CM20214.

The Exam

Slides

Note that these slides are hints to me as to what topics I should cover: they don't contain everything I shall say in lectures. You should come to lectures, take notes in lectures and read books.

The file numbers don't correspond to anything in particular in terms of lectures or subject covered. I may have skipped some material in lectures: why not improve your general education and read the extra too! The exam will only be set on material covered in lectures.

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