Concepts of High-level programming Languages

Theo D'Hondt
Programming Technology Lab - Computer Science Department
Faculty of Sciences
Vrije Universiteit Brussel 


introduction

Objectives

Schedule

Reading

Notes

Software

Test

Contacts

 

LANGUAGE

All software artifacts used in this course are built in Pico. Even the virtual machine itself is built in Pico (it is a so-called meta-circular implementation); since it requires a previously created Pico machine to run, a native implementation (anonymous, but actually developed in ANSI C) is provided. The non-proportional font used in the tutorial notes is also available.

 

Pico for Windows download WinPico.zip
Pico for Windows 1.02 (Copied from http://student.vub.ac.be/~nkaraogl/WinPico/WinPico102.html Thanks to Nihat Karaoglu) download WinPico102.zip
Pico for Macintosh

For other versions: consult http://Pico.vub.ac.be.

Pico

Pico is an experimental language, inspired by Scheme but presenting a conventional syntax (without losing Scheme features such as for instance variable size argument lists) and using tables instead of pairs as composite data construct. More importantly, Pico has extremely simple semantics (more so than Scheme) that allow us to build the virtual machine directly on top of the abstract grammar in a very straightforward way. More information is available with the documentation (see the notes section) and the Pico site itself.

SOURCE CODE

All software artifacts introduced in the lectures are available as executable source code. Please consult the notes section.