COSC369-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025

Programming languages

15 points

Details:
Start Date: Monday, 14 July 2025
End Date: Sunday, 9 November 2025
Withdrawal Dates
Last Day to withdraw from this course:
  • Without financial penalty (full fee refund): Sunday, 27 July 2025
  • Without academic penalty (including no fee refund): Sunday, 28 September 2025

Description

This course focuses on the concepts of programming language theories and their implementations. The course also covers program semantics and program verification, which are powerful tools for guaranteeing the quality of software, for example, proving the correctness of program transformations and that a program is free of certain types of errors.

Programming languages are well accepted as one of the core subjects that every computer scientist should master. The existence of thousands of high-level programming languages reflects the variety of people’s understanding about computation over time, as well as how programming language design demonstrates fitness for special purposes, such as the distinctive requirements from systems programming, software design and web development.

COSC369 introduces the important concepts fundamental for programming languages theories and their implementations. These concepts should also be useful for software engineers who are everyday users of various programming languages to gain a deeper understanding of the tools they use and the artifacts they create. The course also covers program semantics and program verification, which are powerful tools for guaranteeing quality of software, e.g., correctness of program transformations and free of certain types of bugs.

Learning Outcomes

1. Analyse (and self-reflect on) the history of programming languages and its relationship to today's computer science and software engineering practices;
2. Compare and contrast various programming paradigms of declarative languages, imperative languages, object-oriented languages, and understand the distinction between them;
3. Write code in a functional programming language at intermediate level of difficulty;
4. Apply static semantics in program analysis, using concepts such as scope and binding rules, type systems, and type inference in related analyses;
5. Apply dynamic semantics and program verification techniques for showing the validity of program properties.

Prerequisites

Timetable 2025

Students must attend one activity from each section.

Lecture A
Activity Day Time Location Weeks
01 Monday 10:00 - 11:00 Beatrice Tinsley 112
14 Jul - 24 Aug
8 Sep - 19 Oct
Lecture B
Activity Day Time Location Weeks
01 Friday 12:00 - 13:00 Link 309 Lecture Theatre
14 Jul - 24 Aug
8 Sep - 19 Oct
Computer Lab A
Activity Day Time Location Weeks
01 Tuesday 08:00 - 10:00 Jack Erskine 134 Lab 3
14 Jul - 24 Aug
8 Sep - 19 Oct

Timetable Note

Time Commitment: 150 hours
24hr Lecture (2hr/week – 12 weeks)
24hr Laboratory (working on quizzes)
102hr Self-directed learning (reading notes, books, and writing essay)

Course Coordinator

Chenyi Zhang

Assessment

Assessment Due Date Percentage 
Quizzes 20%
Assignment 30%
Final Exam 50%

Textbooks / Resources

Recommended Reading

Benjamin C. Pierce; Types And Programming Language Hardcover ; The MIT Press, 2002 (An electronic copy of this text is available at: https://libcat.canterbury.ac.nz/Record/2657885).

John C. Mitchell; Concepts in Programming Languages ; Cambridge University Press, 2003 (The (UC) library has one copy of this book; an ebook with unlimited use and DRM free is also available at the (UC) library).

Michael L. Scott; Programming Language Pragmatics ; 4th Edition; Morgan Kaufmann (Elsevier), 2016.

Indicative Fees

Domestic fee $998.00

International fee $5,188.00

* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.

For further information see Computer Science and Software Engineering .

All COSC369 Occurrences

  • COSC369-25S2 (C) Semester Two 2025