Class Presentations

In the penultimate week of the semester, groups of students will give presentations on some topic of interest that we have not yet studied this semester. In preparation for these presentations, students must identify and read appropriate sources and, in general, write a lecture, discussion, and/or set of exercises. Students must assign appropriate readings to their fellow students.

Presentations should be approximately thirty (30) minutes long, with an additional ten (10) minutes for questions at the end. Students will be graded on the quality of their presentations and on the quality of the questions they ask other groups.

Potential topics include the following.

Languages

• Alice, a new graphical language for teaching beginners
• APL, a matrix-processing language often called a write-only language.
• Forth, a stack based language
• FP, a classic functional language designed by John Backus.
• Haskell, a modern functional language.
• Logo, a language designed for young novices.
• Postscript, a stack-based image description language
• Smalltalk-80, one of the purest object-oriented languages
• Snobol, a clever, string-oriented language.

General issues:

• Garbage collection
• Macros
• Cross-language compilation
• Exception handling
• Scripting languages

Groups are as follows:

• Group Grok: Sheng, Jonathan, Luis - Garbage Collection [Monday, 30 April]
• Group Green: David, EricB, Dan - Prolog [Wednesday, 2 May]
• Group Grape: Monica, Gaurav, EricO - Postscript [Friday, 4 May]
• Group Grep: Kyle, Eryn, Saugar - Scripting Languages [Monday, 7 May]