EEN594 P (Alternative Programming Paradigms) Spring 2012
Tue Thur 11:00-12:15 in MM318

Examinations

• Mid-term(s): to be announced
• Final: Thursday 3rd May at 11.00 a.m.

Assignments

1. For Tuesday 31st January: Work out two functions, one that appends two lists together (app '(1 2 3) '(x y z)) = (1 2 3 x y z), and one that reverses a list (rev '(1 2 (a b) 3)) = (3 (a b) 2 1), without looking it up in a book or on-line.
2. Due 11 a.m. Tuesday 7th February: the match and rewrite functions.
3. 14th or 16th February: the extended match and rewrite functions.
4. Thursday 22nd March: Make your own conversational robot. Eliza samples, Original rules, just for information.
5. Tuesday 21st February: Design if, and, not for the lisp-in-lisp interpreter. Extra credit: cond and let too.
6. Soon: Make your own lisp interpreter in lisp.
7. Monday 19th March: get the basic functionality of Lisp in C/C++.
8. Tuesday 27th March: Prolog family trees, the diagram.
9. Tuesday 3rd April: Explore not in the Tom and Jerry world, try to find a case where the use of not actually produces a wrong answer.
10. End of Semester: Complete the implementation of prolog in lisp, from class 24.
11. Thursday 12th April: Merge-sort in prolog, with a short English explanation of the design.
12. End of Semester: Convert the game from chapter 2 of "squeak by example" into Conway's game of life.

Downloads and Documentation

• For Lisp:
  • Lispbox For windows, macintosh, and linux.
  • Lisp reference manual browsable html
  • Emacs reference manual in pdf format, or browsable HTML.
  • Emacs quick reference card
• For Prolog:
  • SWI-Prolog For windows and macintosh.
  • Local copy of windows installation file.
  • Reference manual: Browsable HTML, or in pdf format.
• For Smalltalk:
  • Squeak (smalltalk-80) For windows.
  • installation sort-of-instructions.
  • Introductory (slightly irritating) book for squeak, pdf format.
  • Definitive reference for Smalltalk-80, pdf format.

Class History, etc.:

	Class 1		Tue 17‑1‑2012		"Syllabus" and introduction to Lisp.
	Class 3		Tue 24‑1‑2012		The most common little lisp functions. We defined our own little function at last.
	Class 4		Thur 26‑1‑2012		Some more practice functions, COND, some of the standard forms for functions which usually lead to a good start, an introduction to optimised tail recursion and mark-and-sweep garbage collection.
	Class 5		Tue 31‑1‑2012		The mechanics of append and reverse; reverse doesn't have to be quadratic. Structure sharing: nice functions don't modify lists, they build new ones. A beginning thought about Weizenbaum's Eliza (1960-ish) and Bobrow's Student (1964) and user input processing.
	Class 6		Thur 2‑2‑2012		Association lists and simple pattern matching. Accumulating parameters are very useful, but can have a very slightly annoying effect.
	Class 7		Tue 7‑2‑2012		A little bit of basic meta-programming.
	Class 8		Thur 9‑2‑2012		Building a list forwards with rplaca and rplacd, selection sort and merge sort. The Lisp Style, Amusements with a strange-looking programmer's tool kit.
	Class 9		Tue 14‑2‑2012		Hints about match and replace, and a closer look at Eliza: Samples, Original rules. Prettified input processing.
	Class 10		Thur 16‑2‑2012		Loop constructs to drive non-terminating interactive systems, and not much else. Implementing Lisp in Lisp.
	Class 11		Tue 21‑2‑2012		The setq problem is unnecessary, good Lisp programming only uses setq to initialise at the "top level" the read-eval loop. Static binding, dynamic binding, and thunks (or closures).
	Class 12		Thur 23‑2‑2012		How to cure your files of tabs. Lazy evaluation - programming with infinite lists.
	Class 13		Tue 28‑2‑2012		Planning a serious implementation of lisp. Tagged values for S-expressions, cons cells just being arrays of pairs of cons cells, the read-eval-print loop, garbage collection, etc.
	Class 14		Thur 1‑3‑2012		Poor me. Bit-stuffing in C and C++ for compact S-expressions.
	Class 15		Tue 6‑3‑2012		Lisp in C++ - the code. Thinking about compiling Lisp: The S.E.C.D. machine.
	Class 16		Thur 8‑3‑2012		The complete S.E.C.D. machine, and compiling without using append.
			Spring Break
	Class 17		Tue 20‑3‑2012		Introducing Prolog by example: one,
	Class 18		Thur 22‑3‑2012		Different styles for predicate definition: one, two, three, four. The family tree example. Generators vs Filters, numbers.
	Class 19		Tue 27‑3‑2012		What we learned from the family trees. Prolog doesn't treat numbers very flexibly, N>=0 does not work as a generator. The Zermelo Fraenkel Peano System for Numbers, introducing the confusing "cut", filters are usually easier to write than generators, but base-type generator + specific filter = specific generator.
	Class 20		Thur 29‑3‑2012		How resolution works, the need to rewrite rules using anonymous variables before unification. reversible calculations, more of the cut, not = failure.
	Class 21		Tue 3‑4‑2012		A reversible factorial can be constructed as generator + filter, but it's programming not prolog that does it. "not" just swaps success for failure, so it can never instantiate a variable. Prolog can be adapted to support negation, but the price is too high - linear algorithms tend to become exponential.
	Class 22		Thur 5‑4‑2012		Make sure you can predict and understand all the behavious of These Predicates with variables in all sorts of places.
	Class 23		Tue 10‑4‑2012		Natural Language Processing (what we developed in class). ((the unsatisfactory version I thought of using)).
	Class 24		Thur 12‑4‑2012		Implementing Prolog. complete examples of two queries being solved.
	Class 25		Tue 17‑4‑2012		The basic ideas behind smalltalk. Everything is an object, but the essential concept is message passing. An object may receive messages, modify itself, and send messages. The only way to modify an object is to send it a message and hope that it will react by modifying itself in the way you want. Did I mention "reflection"?
	Class 26		Thur 19‑4‑2012		Getting accustomed to Squeak. This is the "file out" for what we did in class. The name has .txt at the end so it won't frighten your browser. Change it to just Thur19Apr.st. How to do "file in" is described in "squeak by example" starting at the bottom of page 45.
	Class 27		Tue 24‑4‑2012		Making numbers out of nothing, with a mixture of smalltalk things: readable version, plain text, The terrible file-out.
	Class 28		Thur 26‑4‑2012		Here is a work-around for missing lisp hash table functionality. Working out the way to implement a completely flexible object oriented language.