Announcements

Please check this page often! Important course information or changes will be posted here (newest news on top)

August 9: Ken's office hours for Friday, August 10, are cancelled. Yes, cancelled. I know, devastating, but you'll have to manage without me.
August 8: As a reminder, the Final will be held tomorrow in CSE 107 from 3:30 PM until whenever the exam ends.
August 7: Project 2 grading is complete. If you are turning in your project late, please be sure to notify me so that I know to look for it. Had some... interesting results.

A few people tried to hardcode the results for tiny and tiny.1. This did not work. Penalties for faulty code are harsher than usual if you attempt to hide the problem like that.

Also, I have previous semester project files, and I have a copy of MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity). This tool is pretty good at finding similar code, including changes to identifiers and comments and whatnot. I found some of the results interesting, so I have forwarded these to Dr. Bermudez. If you suspect that your project may be rated 'interesting' in this context, I recommend you contact us before we contact you.
July 31: Please note that the exam will be more than 75 minutes long, so you will have more than a single class period to complete it. I do not have exact figures on the time, but I expect it will probably be 90 minutes.
right now other than that. July 26: HW9 posted. Due Friday, August 3rd (instead of Thursday), and for EDGE students Tuesday, August 7.

July 26: Please note that there are about 10 lectures remaining and about 7 "meeting times" left in the semester. I advise you to watch all of the remaining lectures. The most important topics for the test are attribute grammars and denotational semantics. I'll try to identify the topics in these last lectures so that you can prioritize viewing if needed later today.
Update: Ok, I have something resembling a list. I'm not sure what numbering system the guys down at EDGE are putting up, but this should at least be in approximately the right order:
July 21: Project 2 due date is set to August 6th for both local and EDGE students. There will be no HW10.
July 19: Homework 8 posted. Due July 26
July 17: More on groups for Project 2: If your group partner has dropped (or drops in the future), please let me know. If your partner has dropped or you worked alone on Project 1 but want to partner with someone who worked alone, you may do so. If you were in a group but wish to leave the group for another reason, you may do so but you may not work with someone else. You have until Monday, July 23 to make your final grouping decision. Group requests other than these or after that date will not be accepted (unless you have a really good excuse), and if I receive project submissions from unregistered groups again they will be penalized.
You don't need to do anything if you are keeping the same group from Project 1. This is only for people who wish to change their group.
July 17: Bin's office hour today T4 is changed to T6.
July 16: It's a bit early, but here is a compilation of sample final exam problems. A few of these questions do not relate to things covered in this class and would not be on the exam.
July 16: Here is a solution to the exam. Let me know if you find any errors in it, since I'm certainly not perfect (my score from last semester: 92. -8 on RPAL programming question).
July 13: Midterm raw grades have been posted to CourseWorX. By raw grades, I mean Dr. Bermudez hasn't gotten back to me on whether any curving or scaling is to be done, but I would assume there will not be. Your exam packets are available for pickup in my office (502), and any regrade requests should be brought to me by July 20. EDGE Students: I will e-mail you scans of your exams on request, so if you want them ask. Statistics:
Max: 100
Mean: 79
Median: 85
Std. Dev: 15
July 12: Project 1 grading complete. If you got "see me", then I have sent an e-mail to your CISE account, which you should read ASAP.
July 12: HW7 posted. Due July 19.
July 11: Apparently July 13 is a Friday. Superstition aside, the HW6 due date was supposed to be July 12, but I'm in a good mood so I'll keep the July 13 due date. HW7 will still be due on a Thursday, and EDGE homeworks are still due on Monday.
July 11: Ken's office hours today moved to Thursday (same time).
July 10: Exam 2 will be held August 9th in class (not Aug 10, as previously guessed).
July 8: The questions in HW6 refer to the question numbers in the second edition of the book, which is different than the first edition. I have typed out the questions into the homework file. Also, there was a typo in the book in 3.6 which has been corrected.
July 6: I have received several e-mails from students who were having trouble submitting HW4+5 because they have 10MB of scanned pages while the upload limit is 1MB. Note that in previous semesters the limit was 500KB. I don't know about you guys, but handwriting makes my hands cramp up a lot faster than typing, and normal paper doesn't copy and paste quite like a text editor. And when I find I've had a mistake propogating through my solution for the past page or two, Find & Replace is much more convenient than an eraser. In the end, my solution came out looking professionally typeset (more or less) in a 51kb PDF file. I know this was just a homework and going to that extent wasn't really necessary, but LaTeX is a very useful skill to have if you intend to publish anything vaguely math related. The extra hour or three spent brushing up on my LaTeX was time well spent, as next time I have to do something like this I will know how to change paper orientation, margins, and define useful macros. I'll post the source code for the document along with the solution next week, in case you're interested. Anyway, to each his own. If you have trouble uploading now or in the future, be sure to e-mail it to me before the due date. -- Ken
July 5: Homework 6 has been posted. Due July 13th.
June 30: FYI, your Project 1 code should duplicate the output format of the sample parser provided in the RPAL section of the website, except that you should use the -noout switch on the sample parser (your parser can't actually execute the code yet, so -noout keeps the parser from producing output from the parsed file).

I have posted the description for Project 2. A due date will be posted eventually. You may not change your project partner, though you may disband the group. If you do not intend to work as a group for Project 2, you must notify me (Ken) by Friday, July 6. If you are working in a group and have not yet notified me, you have until Monday, July 2 to do so.
June 29: EDGE Students: If your proctor is unable to send your completed exams in through the e-mail address I provided, have them contact me via that address for an alternative address. The departmental mail servers seem to dislike attachments for some reason, but normal mail should be able to get through. You guys did remember to take your exams by today, right?
June 27: Question 5 of Homework 3 will be regraded. Bin's office hour on next Tuesday, T4 (July 3) will change to Friday, F5 (July 6).
June 24: I've been asked for the script that I will be using to test your projects. Here you go. It is a Perl script (gzipped), and I have so far tested it on sand using the reference RPAL interpreter, my own Project 1, and on the projects of a few people who have already submitted (not all of which completely passed). The test files used were those provided with the reference RPAL interpreter. For help with the script, try reading it. Also, it should give some help if you run it with a bad argument, like -h. Other than that, no instructions are provided, and none will be given. Use at your own risk.
June 21: EDGE Students: Please return your exams before June 29. Even if the coversheet were to suggest something like July 29. Because that would be silly.
June 20: Homework 3 Solution corrected for (c) and (g). Sorry for the confusion.
June 15: If you are working on the project in a group of at most two people, please e-mail me with the name and UFID of your partner. Just to be on the safe side, both partners should submit the project to CourseWorx before the due date.
June 14: Midterm! The midterm will be held June 21 during our regularly scheduled class time. It will cover all topics up to Recursion and Fixed Point Theory (PPT 14), assuming the EDGE guys put up that lecture in time (and even if they don't, there is a good document on it in the Language Notes page). No calculators or notes. Reference material will be provided, so no you do not have to memorize the RPAL grammar but you will be expected to understand it thoroughly. The test will be 90 minutes long.

The Project 1 deadline has been set to July 4. This gives you the break to work on it, and a few extra days to ask questions. You've started, right?

A combined Homework 4 & 5 has been posted. It is due July 5th. Remember, this is approximately two weeks worth of homework, so don't put it off till the last minute. The material on this homework will be on the test, so it is strongly suggested that you try it out before the test.

Update: Oh yeah, and here are some sample midterm questions.
June 7: HW3 is up. It is due on June 14.
June 6: HW1 has been graded. Check the comments for an idea of what you missed. Also, I've posted the Project 1 description. I'll let you know when I have a due date for it. I (Ken) will be handling the project grading stuff, so direct questions to me.
PS: The project can be done in groups (of two), but homeworks are to be done individually. We do occasionally notice violations of this rule and do not respond well to it. Just do your own homework, ok?
June 5: Due to a damaged DVD, Lecture 11 has been replaced by the equivalent lectures from Spring 2007, which should be marked 11A and 11B. They should be around 45 minutes each. We apologize for the inconvenience.
May 31: Homework 2 is posted, and is due June 7. To clarify, any time during the due date is fine, up to 11:59 PM. Solutions will not be posted until the EDGE deadline, assuming we have any EDGE students.

Also, please be sure to submit your assignments in a ZIP file, since CourseWorx does not bother to save the original file extension for some reason. If we have to guess what type of file you've uploaded, we may dock your points. The actual assignment files should be text files or PDFs. If we find a file type that we can't open on whatever machine we happen to be using, we'll probably dock you points. In either case these penalties will only apply to future homeworks, so don't panic if you uploaded a uncompressed Word document this time around.
May 24: The first homework has been posted, and is due May 31. Please make sure you are properly registered for CourseWorx.
May 14: Welcome to another exciting semester of COP 5555. This is not a live course, so don't bother coming to the scheduled meeting times. The lecture videos should be available soon on WebCT. Please try to watch three per week. Our office hours have been posted on the main page, but remember that summer meeting times are different than during normal semesters.

That's all for now, but please check this announcements page a few times per week for new announcements, including weekly-ish homework assignments.
--Ken
Update: I've been told that the lectures are not yet available online. They will be shown at the scheduled meeting times in the scheduled meeting place and then be made available for download as we go. So feel free to attend the lectures, as this will probably help your study ethic. I know I find it easier to concentrate on a lecture in a classroom than a lecture online, even if it is just a video.

May 11: Please note that our textbook is

Programming Language Pragmatics, Second Edition ISBN: 0126339511Programming Language Pragmatics 2nd Edition.
ISBN: 0126339511 
Author: Michael L. Scott    
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann
Edition: 2
Date published: 2005-11-07
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 912