Exercises for Week 01

Exercise 0

At the top right and at the bottom right of the present page, there is a clickable word, “index”, to access the index of the current version of the lecture notes. Click on it and then peruse the index, making sure that its entries make sense to you (otherwise, click on them to check them out).

Mandatory exercises

Yes you can.

—Barack Obama (well, almost)

• Install Emacs on your computer and go through its tutorial, in preparation for Week 03 and beyond.
• Install OCaml on your computer, in preparation for Week 03 and beyond.
• Install tuareg, the OCaml mode, on your computer, in preparation for Week 03 and beyond.
• Exercise 0: perusing the index
• Exercise 1: writing a few sentences and paragraphs where Aristotle’s four causes are visible
• Exercise 4: writing down the four causes of a compiler
• Exercise 5: playing with I- and T-diagrams
• Exercise 9: playing with I- and T-diagrams
• Exercise 12: finding a known pleonasm and inventing a plausible one
• Exercise 14: assessing whether a sentence is self-referential
• Exercise 16: testing your English vocabulary
• Exercise 21: bootstrapping a compiler with a throw-away interpreter.

Additional exercises

• Exercise 10: playing with I- and T-diagrams (if you have the time)
• Exercise 11: playing with I- and T-diagrams (if you want to overachieve)
• Exercise 17: Cyrano de Bergerac and Pinocchio

The group report

Your joint report should be anonymous so that it can also be graded by a student helper. It should include

• a front page with a meaningful title and a date, but no student names and no student numbers so that it is anonymous,
• a second page with a table of contents with meaningful titles, and
• from the third page and onward,
  • an introduction situating the report in the course of the semester,
  • one section per exercise (“Exercise X: ...”, where ”...” is a meaningful title of your own design),
  • subsections if the exercise is itemized, and
  • a conclusion where you
    • assess what you did,
    • reflect on how you did it, and
    • put your assessment and reflection in perspective.

It is a good idea to write an introductory paragraph (or subsection) and a concluding subsection for each exercise. At the very least, you should copy the statement of the exercise, to make the report self-contained.

Pages should be numbered, and the narrative should be spell checked.

An inspiring (and not necessarily humorous, just on topic) quote or three would be welcome.

For the rest, the report should be precise and as concise as time allows.

Oh, and last but not least, please also upload a separate file “week-01.txt” containing your names, student numbers, and email addresses. Thanks.

Version

Added the last-but-not-least bit [17 Jan 2021]

Created [17 Jan 2021]