Midterm in class on Mon Oct 24

The 331 midterm exam will be given in class on Monday October 24. The exam will cover everything we discussed in class as well as the material in chapters 1-4 and 15 in our textbook.

A good way to prepare is to look at some of the previous midterm exams. You should also check in on the midterm forum on the 331 Blackboard site regularly.

The material covered in CMSC331 differs from semester to semester and instructor to instructor. You will not be held responsible for subjects or material that we did not cover in class, in a homework or ask you to read before October 24. The more recent midterms (e.g, since 2004) in sections that I've taught will be more relevant.

HW4 is out

HW4 is edited and the calc files updated.

Maybe we should wait for the Dart native VM

The Dart compiler turns hello world into 17,260 lines of javascript?!?! See the code.

Dart: Google's new web programming language

Google unveiled its new web programming language Dart today. Its described as a "class-based optionally typed programming language for building web applications". Dart has a native virtual machine and can also be compiled into JavaScript, allowing it to run on any modern browser. Google hopes that Dart will replace JavaScript as the main built-in scripting language in web browsers. See more here.

Are you learning the right programming languages?

Do you know the right programming languages? Depending on your objective, the most important one to know might be Java, Python, PhP, C, or even Haskell.

IEEE Spectrum has a short article on The Top 10 Programming Languages that is based on data from David Welton's Programming Languages Popularity site which "attempts to collect a variety of data about the relative popularity of programming languages".

HW3 is out

HW3 is our and is due by midnight on Wednesday October 12.

Example python programs that use grammars

We put online two small example programs that use grammars.

• cfg has a simple program generate.py that can generate strings from a grammar.
• chart has a program chart.py that can parse strings using a grammar.