CSE 505 Projects
Autumn 1994

The 505 project should involve writing a 4-10 page paper on a topic related to programming language design and implementation, and may also involve a programming project. Students can work individually or in pairs on the project and paper. Optionally, students can give a presentation in class on their work. (More work will be expected of a pair than an individual.)

If you do an implementation project, it can either be something like implementing an SK-reduction machine, or implementing some program in language X. If the latter, your paper should discuss not just the particulars of the project, but also what the relevant special features of X are, and how they helped and hindered the development. Perhaps better, implement it in both languages X and Y and compare.

A brief project proposal is due on November 21 (by e-mail). The project is due the last day of class, Dec 7.

Here are some suggestions for possible projects. Naturally you aren't restricted to these suggestions, but can work on a different topic if you wish.

• Functional programming:
  • implementing an SK reduction machine
  • Haskell design; differences from Miranda and other functional languages
  • supercombinators and the G machine
  • strictness analysis
• Procedural Languages (Algol descendants, C-like languages, etc).
  • Cove ... from Craig Chambers: "A potential 505 project might be to refine the current Cove language design. Cove is a type-safe dialect of C. We'd like someone to work out the precise details of the casting rules and the type parameterization structure to ensure type safety cannot be circumvented."
• Languages for concurrency
  (see the 590L topics this quarter)
• Object-Oriented Programming
  • Cecil (could include an implementation project in Cecil)
  • Hermes
  • type systems for object-oriented languages
  • compilation techniques
  • meta-object protocols and reflection
  • Beta (an object-oriented language with a single abstraction mechanism)
  • concurrent object-oriented languages
  • Eiffel
• Logic Programming; Constraint Programming
  • Strand (perhaps including an implementation project)
  • a survey of concurrent logic programming
  • Kaleidoscope. (This is a locally grown constraint imperative programming language. We'd like to have one or two people write some sample programs, help debug the compiler, and explore the programing style. Could evolve into a quals project.)
  • constraint logic programming
  • concurrent constraint programming -- either a survey, or using a language such as AKL
  • the Oz language
• Other
  • Social and political aspects of programming language development
  • continuations
  • persistant programming languages
  • Visual languages (e.g. Prograph, Visual Basic, component-based programming)
  • scripting languages
  • language support for atomic data types