Syllabus for UCLA Computer Science 131

Texts

A new edition of Lutz and Ascher was made optional starting in Spring 2004; earlier editions should be fine for getting started with Python.

Required texts

• Adam Brooks Webber, Modern Programming Languages: A Practical Introduction, Franklin, Beedle & Associates, ISBN 1-887902-76-7 (2002-10-01).
• Alex Martelli, Python In a Nutshell, O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 0-596-00188-6 (2003-03).

Optional text

• Mark Lutz and David Ascher, Learning Python, 2nd edition, O'Reilly & Associates, ISBN 0-596-00281-5 (2003-12).

Topics

Language design issues

• efficiency, safety, convenience
• programming categories
  • procedural
  • functional
  • object-oriented
  • declarative
  • scripting
• scaling problems
• history and evolution of programming languages

functions

• motivation
• recursion and tail recursion
• activation records
• functions as data
• closures
• debugging via divide and conquer
• persistence
• amortized efficiency

syntax

• tokenization
• grammars

names

• names, binding, visibility, scope, lifetime
• static vs dynamic scope

types

• type, values, operations
• type checking and conversion
• elementary and structured types
• explicit vs implicit storage management
• stack vs heap

control

• expression evaluation
• rewrite rules
• pattern matching, unification, and backtracking
• structured programs

objects

• object-oriented design
• encapsulation and data abstraction
• separating behavior from implementation
• classes and class hierarchies
• inheritance
• polymorphism
• collections and iteration

exceptions

• design issues
• when not to use exceptions
• case study: exceptions in Java

concurrency

• competition and cooperation
• synchronization
• case study: multithreading in Java

semantics

• lambda calculus
• program verification

Language paradigms

ML

• type inference and annotations
• pattern matching
• polymorphism
• higher-order functions and currying
• type constructors

Scheme

• syntax
• lists
• comparison (e.g., eq? vs equal?)
• syntactic forms: core and extension
• let and lambda
• tail recursion
• continuations

Prolog

• propositional logic
• predicate calculus: instantiation, atoms, variables, structures
• clausal form and Horn clauses
• the resolution principle
• depth-first backward chaining with backtracking
• debugging
• memory management
• the closed world assumption

Java

• primitive and reference types
• classes and instances
• variables, methods, constructors, and overloading
• inheritance, abstract classes, final classes, and interfaces
• compilation units, packages and visibility
• the Object class
• Java class library basics
• collections
• exceptions
• threads

Python

• the Python shell
• scripting
• functional and object-oriented programming
• modules and packages
• Python library basics
• extending and embedding