The references for lectures can get rather lengthy, so I’m putting them in a separate posting. This time we have a list of sources for the various quotes in the lecture. Comments, corrections, and additional material welcome.
Lecture 1: What’s So Important about Language?
11 January 2010Introduction to the course; review of some programming languages; how languages shape programs; what programming languages might do for us; some topics to be covered in the course.
Link: Slides
Homework
The next lecture is at 9am on Thursday. Before then:
- Read the Wikipedia article on History of programming languages. (If you find it’s missing something, fix that.)
- What is a closure? How does it differ from a function pointer? What are closures good for? What languages have them?Post one or more of the following as comments below:
- An explanation of closures, or a pointer to an explanation online.
- An example that uses a closure.
- A language that has closures, and how you would represent one of the examples in it.
Please don’t duplicate each other’s answers — and no more than one language each, leave some for others.