Resources

[General] [Textbooks] [Motivation] [History]
[ML] [Prolog] [Ruby] [SmallTalk] [PHP] [C#]
[References] [Miscellaneous]

General

There are nice online notes for much of this course's contents at Virginia Tech's CS3304 web site.

Textbooks

• Sethi book, copies of source code from some of the chapters: author's page, publisher's page (ftp)
• Ullman book, errata, solutions to starred exercises, programs

Motivation for studying Programming Languages (related to Software Design)

• Rocket failures: Description of the French Arianne rocket ($500 million) explosion due to converting a 64 bit floating point number to a 16 bit signed integer. (See also the full report). Boeing finally had a good launch after expensive ($450+ million) rocket failures due to software problems. Other numerical problems caused the deaths of 28 in the Patriot Missile failure, and the loss of nearly $1 billion in the sinking of an offshore platform.
• Nancy Leveson's page describes the Therac-25 accidents, where a radiation therapy machine massively overdosed five people over a period of two and a half years. She also has links to the Mars Climate orbiter failure due to incorrect translation between English units and metric units. She writes that "It has been said that modern aircraft are simply computers with wings. The Boeing 777, for example, has more than four millions lines of software and 1,280 embedded processors to control subsystems and aid pilots in flight management."
• Software problems in the luggage handling at Denver's International airport delayed its opening for over 9 months, costing $1.1 million a day. See description from September 1994 Scientific American article.
• A catalogue of computer related problems (the RISK site) by Peter Neumann. The archive starts at 1985 and is keyword searchable.

History of Computing & Software

• The Computer Museum History Center has a great timeline of hardware and software. It has exhibits on the history of the internet and a microprocessor timeline. Check out the Collections significant artifacts (including items such as mp3's of the 1964 IBM 1403 printer playing music)
• Java app let emulator of the first SpaceWars game (thanks to Ricardo Gonzalez, Fall '01)
• See University of Minnesota's Charles Babbage Institute list of history sites
• Lambda the Ultimate has a detailed programming language geneological diagram.
• Very interesting articles in the Computer History Association of California pages (scroll down to see the index).
• Smithsonian site, includes a copy of the notebook page with one of the first computer "bugs" (better picture here). Scroll down to see copies of the original press releases of the 1946 ENIAC, and interviews with computing history luminaries (Marc Andreeson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs...).
• The History of Computing site from Virginia Tech (J.A.N. Lee) has computing history overviews (see the "Machine That Changed the World" BBC video series link), emulators of historical systems, biographies and photos of computing pioneers (scroll down) and companies,
• Computerworld's history page
• Home pages for many people who have had an impact on computing is included as one of the links in
• The Virtual Museum of Computing (scroll down a ways to find the more organized stuff) has virtual exhibits (e.g. links to computing pioneers' home pages), corporate histories, and some interesting simulators of historic systems.
• IEEE Annals of the History of Computing abstracts. Retrieve the actual articles through UIC here since otherwise you need a password.
• ACM's History of Programming Languages (mirror page), taken from Second ACM SIGPLAN Conference on History of Programming Languages April 20 - 23, 1993

ML

• Getting Started in ML.
• See the Ullman book link listed above
• SML/NJ home page. This page includes downloads for Windows (~5 MB) and SUN (~40 MB installed), links to tutorials, links to the FAQ
• ML newsgroup (comp.lang.ml)
• See the UNC's ML notes based on the Ullman book, as well as ML ADT's.

Prolog

• In our CS lab use: /usr/bin/gprolog
• Gnu-Prolog page which includes downloads and documentation.
        Getting started with Gnu-Prolog, and even more(pdf) Gnu-Prolog beginners help.
• See the online book First Course in Prolog Programming by Paul Brna, as well as "Learn Prolog Now" by Blackburn et. al.
  
• Family Tree Example Reviewed in Class, overhead of trace (pdf)
• Monkey & Bananas Problem
  • Monkey & Bananas "clean" Solution
  • Monkey & Bananas "messy" Solution with trace
• Fox, Goose, & Grain Solution
• Water jug puzzle assignment description
  
• Good examples of problem solving using Prolog, from Richard "Dick" Botting's labs at Cal State San Bernardino( labs 18, 19, 20)
• Collection of Prolog puzzles, (though using a different version of prolog)
• General logic puzzles page.

Ruby

See this presentation by Matt Hamilton.

SmallTalk

See this presentation by Wenling Chen.

PHP

See this presentation by Tom Indelli.

C#

See this presentation by Elias Block.

References List

See here for a password-protected directory of some of the papers listed below.

• Dijkstra, Edsger W. Go To Statement Considered Harmful, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 11, No. 3, March 1968, pp. 147-148. Classic paper starting the controversy.
• Knuth D.E. "Structured Programming with goto Statements", Computing Surveys Vol 6(4) pp261-301 Dec 1974. Examples of code that show how using a GOTO is better, and others showing it is worse. See the course notes from this paper.
• Rubin, Frank. "'GOTO Considered Harmful' Considered Harmful" (letter to the editor), Communications of the ACM, vol. 30, no. 3 (March 1987), pp. 195-6. This letter generated more responses than any issue in the CACM. In it Ruben suggested the following code as a motivation for using GOTO.
  

   for i := 1 to n do begin
    for j := 1 to n do
      if x[i,j] <> 0 then goto REJECT;
    write("First all-zero row is: ',i);
    break;
REJECT:
  end;

• See Larry Cotton's article on Basic for Beginners and Bruce Karsh's article that argue against structured programming (and for goto), as well as Todd Heimarck's article arguing for structured programming. See Steven McConnel's discussion of goto code transformations and note above the link to the course notes from the Knuth paper.
  
  
• Hughes, John. Why Functional Programming Matters, Some notes on this paper.
• Backus, "Can programming be liberated from the von Neumann style? A functional style and its algebra of programs", Communications of the ACM, Vol. 21, No. 8, pp. 613-641, 1978.
• C. Bohm & G. Jacopini, "Flow Diagrams, Turing Machines and Languages with Only Two Formation Rules," Communications of the ACM, vol9(5) May 1966, pp 366-371. See notes part way down here.
• Parnas, D. L. "On the Criteria to be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 15, No. 12, December 1972, pp. 1053 - 1058.
• Wirth, Niklaus. "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement," Communications of the ACM, Vol. 14, No. 4, April 1971, pp. 221 - 227.
• Miller, George A. 1956. The magic number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information. Psycholgical Review 63: 81-97.
• Turing, Alan.M. Computing Machinery and Intelligence, by (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59, 433-560. The "Turing Test".
• John K. Ousterhout. "Scripting: Higher Level Programming for the 21st Century", IEEE Computer, March 1998.

Miscellaneous

• For a laugh check out Edsger Dijkstra's caustic evaluations of programming languages (c. 1982).
• Women in Computing
• Futurist Programming Notes
• The song "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" in 227 programming languages
• "Hello World" in 204 languages

• Lambda the Ultimate has good links to other courses, papers
• Programming Language Theory pages online
• Introduction to Logic and Truth Tables