CM20318: Comparative Programming Languages

Unit Catalogue

Some links

• Programming Languages Influence Network
• Another network, more up-to-date
• Undefined Behaviour in 2017 Reflecting on the state of C/C++ with a list of about 200 places in C/C++ where behaviour is undefined
• More on undefined behaviour in C
• Functional Programming on Wikipedia
• List of functional languages
• Functional Programming For The Rest of Us from a Java perspective
• Mostly adequate guide to FP (in javascript)
• History of Lisp by John McCarthy
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs full text
• Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs Video Lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman
• 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
• Swift A post-C language
• Lua Scripting, procedural, functional, bytecode
• OCaml Functional (and imperative and OO)
• 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
• Composition over inheritance
• Entity-Component-Systems
• Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII)
• A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
• Facebook's New Spam-Killer Hints at the Future of Coding using Haskell
• Rosetta Code solutions to tasks in many languages
• Esolang an esoteric programming languages wiki
• Use after free and dangling pointers
• The worst mistake of computer science about how NULL is a big problem
• Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake
• The Semipredicate Problem how to deal with errors
• Wikipedia list of programming languages
• Advice on avoiding basic errors in C C++ Java
• Comparing implementations of a network driver in C, Rust, Go, C#, Java, OCaml, Haskell, Swift, Javascript, and Python
• Object-Oriented Programming - The Trillion Dollar Disaster Why it's time to move on from OOP
• How Many Lines of C it Takes to Execute a + b in Python?
• Zero Overhead Principle
• Literate Programming

The Exam

Online Past Papers

Past Papers for CM20253 are a good source for the kind of questions that might appear in CM20318 (though the CM20318 paper will be answer three out of a choice of four).

Moodle

Slides

Note that these slides are reminders to me as to what topics I should cover: as with all units you are expected to read around the subject and refer to your lecture notes. Don't treat the slides as the entirety of your study. Or as model answers for the exam!

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 and your lecture notes will tell you what was covered in lectures.

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