Lecture 1: References

11 January 2010

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.

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Lecture 1: What’s So Important about Language?

11 January 2010

Introduction 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:

  1. Read the Wikipedia article on History of programming languages. (If you find it’s missing something, fix that.)
  2. 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.