CS254r ANNOUNCEMENT		        Feb 1, 1999

Prof. Cheatham and Dr. Walton are giving CS254r this
Spring semester as a Graduate Seminar on the
Principles of Programming Languages.

  Time and Place:   Fridays from 2:30-4:30pm in ESL 412
  Web Page:   www.deas.harvard.edu/courses/cs254r/1999/

We will cover all of the book:

    Foundations of Programming Languages
    by John C. Mitchell
    MIT Press 1996
    
and in addition will cover one paper from the
literature per student.

This is not a course for the faint of heart.  The
book is long; we will cover 60 pages per week.  We
will NOT have time to cover that much of the material
in class, so students will have to learn by reading.
The individual chapters of the book are neither a
particularly difficult nor a particularly easy read,
but the book as a whole has a labyrinthian quality.

Each week each student will be assigned to write up one
exercise or present one deduction system or theorem in
class.  This activity will be designed to consume 2
hours per week, assuming the student has already read
and understood the appropriate portion of the book.
Students may opt out of this activity for 3 of the 13
weeks of the course, and in effect may choose to not
read or to skim about 180 pages of the book.  Most of
the work in the course will be simply reading and
understanding the book.

Each student will be required to report on one paper
from the literature to be selected by the instructor
in consultation with the class.  Each student
will be required to work with others on 1 or 2 hard
exercises that will be done on a best-effort, multi-
week, multi-person basis.

If you are interested in this course, you should try to
read some of its textbook first.  A copy is in ESL 225
with Kimberly Trudel: please sign out for the copy and
do NOT take it out of ESL (you may take it somewhere
comfortable in ESL to read for a while).

The instructors do not expect many students, and will
give the course with as few as two qualified students.
You need to have done well in CS152 or have very strong
pure math abilities to attempt this course.

This seminar is also open to non-credit visitors who
meet the requirements and are willing to follow through
on any commitments they make.

The text is available from the MIT Press Bookstore in
Kendall Square (at last look they had plenty of copies).

When Dr. Walton and Prof. Cheatham teach together,
Prof. Cheatham is usually the official instructor of
record, but this time it turned out the reverse for
administrative reasons, so Dr. Walton is the official
instructor of record and must sign whereever an
instructor's signature is required.