Department
Princeton University

Computer Science 510
Programming Languages
Andrew Appel

Spring 2024

General Information       Schedule       Policies
Summary: A hands-on introduction to the use of formal methods for reasoning about software, and for specifying and reasoning about programming languages. Students will use an interactive proof assistant to learn about logic and its applications to proofs of program correctness, to operational and axiomatic semantics of programming languages, and to type systems. Also, an introduction to functional programming languages.

Administrative Information

Lectures: TTh 3:00-4:20, Room: CS 105
Labs: Friday, 1:30-3:30pm, in Friend Center 1st-floor library space (see Ed post).

Professor: Andrew Appel - CS Building, room 209. appel@cs.princeton.edu
To make an appointment to see me, just ask me after class, or e-mail.

Teaching Assistant: Leo Chen, leocjy@princeton.edu

Use Ed for homework questions. You can also come to Lab hours.

Textbooks: Our main texts will be Software Foundations (Volumes 1 and 2 by Pierce et al., Volumes 3 and 5 by Appel et al.), available free online. (Use the link here, not the Software Foundations home page, to make sure you get the version in sync with this semester's course.) You can download the whole thing: sf.tgz. Unpack with tar xfz sf.tgz and you'll have,

We will use the Coq Reference Manual and the Coq Standard Library

We will use the Objective Caml manual.

Other required reading (later in the semester):

Dafny tutorials, by Rustan Leino and others, 2011-2023.

Boolean Satisfiability Solvers: Techniques and Extensions by G. Weissenbacher and S. Malik, in Tools for Analysis and Verification of Software Safety and Security, T. Nipkow, O. Grumberg, B. Hauptmann, G. Kalus, editors, IOS Press, NATO Science for Peace and Security Series, Spring 2012.

Software: We will use the following software.

The Coq theorem prover, version 8.17.1. Installation instructions here.

The OCaml dialect of the ML programming language.
Very possibly the Coq Platform installation (see above) will install ocaml for you as well.