Department
Princeton University

Computer Science 510
Programming Languages
Andrew Appel

Spring 2015

General Information       Schedule       Policies
Summary: A hands-on introduction to the use of formal methods for reasoning about software, and for specifying and reasoning about programming languages. Students will use an interactive proof assistant to learn about logic and its applications to proofs of program correctness, to operational and axiomatic semantics of programming languages, and to type systems. Also, an introduction to functional programming languages.

Administrative Information

Lectures: MW 11:00-12:20, Room: CS 105
Labs: Fridays 10:00-11:50 in Friend 017

Professor: Andrew Appel - 222 CS Building - 258-4627 appel@cs.princeton.edu
To make an appointment to see me, just ask me after class or call/email Nicole, 8-4624.

Teaching Assistants: Qinxiang Cao (qinxiang@) and Santiago Cuellar (scuellar@), room 242 CS building.

Use Piazza for homework questions. Better yet: come to Lab, get real-time acoustic 3-D holographic assistance.


Textbooks: Our main text will be Software Foundations, version 3.2, by Pierce et al., which is available free online.

We will use the Coq 8.4 Reference Manual and the Coq 8.4 Standard Library

We will use the Objective Caml manual.

Other required reading (later in the semester):

Dafny tutorial, by Rustan Leino, 2011.

Boolean Satisfiability Solvers: Techniques and Extensions by G. Weissenbacher and S. Malik, in Tools for Analysis and Verification of Software Safety and Security, T. Nipkow, O. Grumberg, B. Hauptmann, G. Kalus, editors, IOS Press, NATO Science for Peace and Security Series, Spring 2012.


Software: We will use the following software.

The Coq theorem prover, version 8.4pl5. This is installed on the OIT cluster computers (e.g., in Friend 017, 016, 009, 007, and 005). It is free software, and you should install it on your own computer.

The Objective Caml dialect of the ML programming language. This is free software. It is installed on hats.princeton.edu, on penguins.cs.princeton.edu, and on OIT cluster computers. Or it's easy to install on your own computers.