Course Modules

An overview of course modules will be posted here as they're published. To start:

• 01.1: Welcome to Programming Languages — the history of programming languages, what CS 131 is (and isn't), and the three big ideas that run through the whole course.
• 02.1: Introduction to Haskell and Functional Programming — your first real Haskell: values, functions, bindings, and a first taste of pattern matching.
• 02.2: Functions = Values — immutability and what it buys you, currying, and seeing functions themselves as ordinary values you can pass around and combine.
• 03.1: Lists, Tuples, Pattern Matching, and Parameterized Types — structured data in Haskell: building and taking apart lists and tuples, map and filter, and reading type variables like a in [a].
• 03.2: Haskell Data Types, Pattern Matching, and Type Classes — defining your own data with data, constructors as functions, recursive types and the functions that mirror them, and what deriving (Show, Eq, Ord) actually means.
• 04.1: Code as Data, Evaluating Expressions — expressions vs. statements, syntax vs. semantics, concrete vs. abstract syntax, and representing and evaluating arithmetic expressions as recursive Haskell data.
• 04.2: Representing Functions — representing function definitions and applications as data, explaining application via substitution, call-by-name vs. call-by-value, and currying inside the interpreter.
• 05.1: Environments, Scope, and Closures — replacing substitution with an environment of bindings, adding let as syntactic sugar for function application, dynamic vs. static scope, and closures as a function paired with its defining environment.

Coming soon

The rest of the module list will be posted here as the semester develops.