Midterm study guide
===================

The midterm will be available from 8:00am on Monday, November 1st
until 7:59am on Tuesday, November 2nd.  This means that it is
available for 24 hours. You will have 2 hours to take the midterm.

While it is available for a long time, it's best practice to take it
as early as is practicable. Waiting until the last minute is a very
bad strategy; if there are any technical impediments, then you may not
to complete the midterm. The reason that I give you 24 hours is to
give you plenty of time to solve technical problems.

Here are the topics that will be covered on the midterm:

  Evolution of programming languages

  Advantages and disadvantages of assembly language; advantages and disadvantages with higher-level languages

  Language considerations:
    Expressivity
    Environments
    The spectrum from compilation through interpretation,
    Domain specificity
    Ease of learning
    Ease of use
    Ease of implementation
    Open source
    Luck (early adoption by a community, significant financial backing)

  Language types:
    Assembly
    Dataflow
    Dictionary-based
    Functional
    Imperative
    Logic
    Scripting
    [Object-oriented]

  Syntax
    Tokenization
    Regular expressions
    Derivations and parse trees
    Finite automata
    How to scan: one-off, formalizations such as flex
    Lexical errors
    Pragmas
    Parsing:
       Recursive descent
       Bottom-up parsing
    Language and grammar classes

  Allocating space
    Static allocation
    Allocation via stack(s)
    Allocation via heap(s)
    Garbage collection and its strategies

  Scope
    Static scope
    Dynamic scope
    Nesting
    Declarations and type inferencing
    Modules

  Symbol tables
  Aliasing
  Overloading
  Closures
  First-class values
  Macro expansion
  Separate compilation


  Semantics
    Analysis
    Attribute grammars
    Synax tree decoration
    Evaluating attributes and transference
      of semantic information through a syntax tree
    Action routines in attribute grammars

  Expression evaluation
  Infix, prefix, postfix notation
  Associativity and precedence
  Assignment
  Initialization
  Ordering with expressions
  Short-circuit evaluation
  Unstructured control flow
  Structured control flow
  Continuations
  Case/switch structures
  Iteration and alternation
  Iterators
  Recursion 
    Stack issues
  Applicative versus normal-order evaluation

  Types
    Meaning of?
    Polymorphsim
    Orthogonality
  Type checking
    Equivalence
    Compatibility
    Inferencing
  Parametric polymorphism
  Composite types
    Records / structs
      Syntax and operations
      Memory layout
      Unions
    Arrays
    Strings
    Sets
    Pointers and recursive types
    Lists
    Files and i/o