CS354: Final Review

Review for Final Exam

The final is comprehensive. Look through the other exams and make sure you understand the problems you missed. Similar questions could show up on the final.
Read the book; look at the exercises to see if you understand what they are getting at.
Make sure you understand the assigned homework problems.
Look through the notes from class
Understand the programs that were demonstrated in class

Chapters 1-8: Look at the reviews for exam1 and exam2.

Expect a couple of problems similar to those from the earlier tests.
BNF grammars - writing the rules as well as derivations and parse trees
Operator associativity and precedence
Regular expressions
Memory allocation for various types of variables - primitive, arrays, structs, pointers
Array slices
Static vs. dynamic scope

Chapter 9 : Subprograms

Sections 1-6 and 9
Local referencing environments
Parameter passing mechanisms
- by value
- by reference
- by value-result and by result
- by name
Chapter 10 : Implementing Subprograms
- Semantics of call/return
- Activation records
- Static and dynamic chains
- Static and dynamic scope
Chapter 15 : Functional Programming Languages
- Sections 1-5, 9-10
- Mathematical functions and functional forms
- Basic Ideas of functional languages
- Scheme
  - Know how the list manipulation functions work - cons, car, cdr
  - Be prepared to write a simple scheme function
  - Be able to trace the execution of a scheme function
Interpreters
- Differences between interpreted and compiled languages
- Steps in interpretation
- Given a simple grammar, be able to identify and possibly write the functions needed for a recursive descent parser.
- Think about how you might expand the capability of your interpreter. For example how might you add new primitive types or represent structured data types.
Think about the languages we discussed during the semester as well as those you heard about during the oral presentations. If you had to pick three or four languages to study in detail that would illustrate the range of topics covered in this course, which languages would you pick. Explain why you picked those languages in terms of what concepts they are useful for illustrating.