CS 380 Exam One Terms and Concepts

Chapter 1

• Categories of programming languages
• Reasons to study programming languages
• Compilation vs. interpretation and variations
• Steps of compilation:
  • Scanner (lexical analysis)
  • Parser (syntax analysis)
  • semantic analysis and intermediate code generation
  • target code generation

Chapter 2

• Tokens and regular expressions
• what scanner code looks like (case or if statements)
• Context-free grammars:
  • using grammars to generate parse trees
  • showing that grammars are ambiguous
  • fixing ambiguous grammars to not be ambiguous
  • recursive descent parsing
  • writing context-free grammars for particular languages

Chapter 3

• Binding time:
  • language design time
  • language implementation time
  • program writing time
  • compile time
  • link time
  • load time
  • run time
• Static vs. dynamic in this context
• static allocation
• stack-based allocation
• heap-based allocation
• garbage collection
• Scope rules:
  • static scoping
  • nested subprograms, including how access to non-local objects works
  • modules
  • dynamic scoping, including why and how
  • simulating code execution with static vs. dynamic scoping
  • aliases and overloading
• Referencing environments

Chapter 4

• attribute grammars, basic idea, what they are used for

Chapter 5

• nothing