Exercises for Week 01

Warning

Your handin should be uploaded as a group on Canvas, i.e., not, repeat, not individually.

Exercise 00

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 00: perusing the index
• Exercise 01: writing a few sentences and paragraphs where Aristotle’s four causes are visible
• Exercise 06: going through Emacs’s tutorial
• Exercise 08: writing down the four causes of a compiler
• Exercise 09: playing with I- and T-diagrams
• Exercise 13: playing with I- and T-diagrams
• Exercise 16 – pleonasms: finding a known pleonasm and inventing a plausible one
• Exercise 18 – self-referential sentences: assessing whether a sentence is self-referential
• Exercise 20 – all the vowels, including y, in alphabetic order: testing your English vocabulary
• Exercise 26: bootstrapping a compiler with a throw-away interpreter
• Exercise 27: on the relativity of compile time and run time when compiling a compiler

Additional exercises

• Exercise 14: playing with I- and T-diagrams (if you have the time)
• Exercise 15: playing with I- and T-diagrams (if you want to overachieve)
• Exercise 21 – Cyrano de Bergerac meets Pinocchio: Cyrano de Bergerac and Pinocchio
• Exercise 28: efficiency vs. inefficiency in compilers

The group report

As a training for the midterm project, your joint report should be anonymous so that it could 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,
  • a general introduction situating the report in the course of the semester,
  • one section per exercise (“Exercise XY: ...”, where ”...” is a meaningful title of your own design),
  • for each exercise, an introductory subsection and a concluding subsection,
  • more subsections for exercises that are itemized, and
  • a general conclusion where you
    • assess what you did,
    • reflect on how you did it, and
    • put your assessment and reflection in perspective.

For each exercise, the introductory subsection should contain, at the very least, the statement of the exercise, to make the report self-contained. This statement should then be explained in your own words, to convey an understanding of the question. Explaining the exercise in your own words is really helpful because trying to answer a question one doesn’t understand, well.

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, because this anonymity stuff will only matter for the midterm project. Thanks.

Version

Completed [16 Jan 2022]

Fine-tuned [15 Jan 2022]

Created [14 Jan 2022]