Programming Languages and Compilers - CS 164 - Fall 2003

January 19, 2004. PA6 grade. The performance by the Optimania (PA6) contest teams, as well as the extra credit earned is now posted.

December 18. Final exam results.

Exam scores are now available in glookup. We will not be handing back exams. 
However, you can stop by to view your exam between 1pm and 2pm on Thursday, 
Dec 18. The exams are sorted by section:

9am, 10am:    Manu in 517 Soda
11am, no section circled:    Dave in 517 Soda
2pm:        Prof. Bodik in 776 Soda
3pm:        Bowei in 511 Soda

Final exam stats:

Exam was out of 150

Median         86
Mean         86
Std dev         24
Top score    134

38 exams scored 100 or higher.

Thanks for taking our course, and enjoy your break!

December 16. Office hours. Manu should be around 517 Soda for most of the afternoon, until 4pm or so. Drop by if you have questions.

December 14. Extra office hours. Bowei will be available 1pm-4pm Tuesday (Monday) in 511 Soda to answer questions.

December 14. Two exam-related announcements.(1) You will be allowed to bring your cheat sheets from midterms 1 and 2 to the final, along with an additional cheat sheet (two sides of a page). (2) The material covered by Prof. Bodik in sections, the pointer reversal technique for mark-and-sweep garbage collection, will not be on the exam.

December 14. Extra office hours. Manu will be available from 11am-12pm and 1pm-4pm tomorrow (Monday) in 517 Soda to answer questions. We will also have extra office hours on Tuesday, which will be posted as we decide them. These extra office hours are instead of a final review session; come with questions.

December 12. PA weights. As promised at the beginning of the semster, weights of individual project assigments have just been adjusted to reflect their relative difficulty. The new weights are as shown below.

• PA1 3.5%
• PA2 7.5%
• PA3 6%
• PA4 11.5%
• PA5 11.5%

December 12. GC Section Notes. Section notes on garbage collection have been posted.

December 11. Late PA6 submissions. To accommodate those who put a lot of work into their optimizers but didn't quite manage to debug their code before the PA6 deadline, we allow late PA6 submissions, with certain restrictions. Please read the late submission rules below.

PA6 late submission rules:

• As announced in a lecture, the original PA6 deadline was Tuesday, Dec 9, noon.
• PA6 can be submitted after the deadline, with the usual penalty of 10% for each (partial) day.
• PA6 cannot be submitted after Friday Dec 12, noon.
• PA6 submitted late are eligible for extra credit in the way desctribed in the lecture (minus the late penalty), but they cannot participate in the contest. That is, late submissions will not be used to compute the "best performance", which means that they will not bump up the reference point against which other students are assigned the extra credit.

December 8. First notes on the final exam. The exam will be given Dec 17 (Wed) 12:30-3:30 in 100 LEWIS.

The exam will contain three kinds of questions:

• midterm-style questions covering the material from the register allocation onwards. There will be no question on dynamic translation, but all other lectures, including the last two, are fair game. See old finals for some examples of questions (most Cool-based questions can be rephrased to Decaf, so these questions can all appear in some form on the exam).
• a project-related question, covering PA4 and/or PA5.
• One or two comprehensive questions. These questions will test the knowledge of the entire semester's material. These questions will have a practical bias. For example, we will give you an example program in some tiny programming language (think the languages described by Dave in his lecture), describe this example to you (that is, give the informal semantics of the languaeg by telling you what the program is supposed to do), after which we could ask you to describe a suitable grammar for the language, design a suitable AST, and show how to build an interpreter for the AST, or show how to generate code from the AST.

December 2. Submitting PA5. You should be able to submit PA5 now. If you find a problem with the smoke tests, please let the course staff know. Also, as usual, please read the errata page before submitting and make sure you didn't miss something.

November 24. PA5 clarifications. See the errata page for important PA5 clarifications.

November 21. PA4 statistics. For projects (i.e., counting each project once no matter how many team members), the mean was 72 and the standard deviation was 20. See also the histogram. The red line goes with the right-hand vertical axis and shows the cumulative percentage in or below each range.

November 21. Midterm 2 statistics. The mean was 74 and the standard deviation was 12. The 90th percentile was 88, the 75th percentile 81, the 50th percentile 75, and the 25th percentile 66. See also the histogram.

November 21. Midterm 2 solutions. Midterm 2 and solutions are now available on the Midterms & Exams page.

November 12. Section Handouts
Handouts from review section: [1 (pdf)] [2 (pdf)] [3 (pdf)]

November 11. Extra office hours. There will be extra office hours from 2-4pm tomorrow (Wednesday) in 511 or 517 Soda (come find us).

November 3. PA3 Grades. PA3 grades should be available on glookup. You may not have gotten an email with detailed results yet; we are working on it. Statistics will also be posted soon. Update: There are some issues with partners, email notifications, and glookup. We are working on it, and we'll post an update when it's fixed. The partner who actually submitted should have his/her grade in glookup and should have received an email. Another update: glookup should be fully populated now. Please let the course staff know if you missing a PA3 grade in glookup.

November 3. More PA4 clarifications. See the errata page.

October 29. Important PA4 clarifications. Please see the errata page for important clarifications on PA4.

October 28. PA2 grades. Grades are out for PA2, however late projects (those that has used up their slip days) have not been factored into the grade. Please direct regrade requests to Bowei.

October 27. PA4 clarifications. See the errata page for two small PA4 clarifications.

October 27. Wednesday office hours. Dave will be out of town this Wednesday, so Manu will teach his 11am section. Dave's 1pm office hour is cancelled, and Manu will hold his office hour at 2pm instead of 11am.

October 22. Slightly fixed PA3 solution.The PA3 solution has been updated to make the RDParser.peek() method public. Please re-download it if you have downloaded it already.

October 22. Intel Assembly References

• A concise summary of x86 assembly from the appendix of the NASM assembler.
• Intel Assembly Manuals Page
• Intel Instruction Set Reference Manual
• Differences in syntax in examples of asm code you may find on the web.

October 14. WA2 grades.
Some of the WA2 homeworks are missing due to an error by the coursestaff. In order to be fair to everyone, we will be giving everyone a pass grade for WA2.

October 12. Even more PA3 errata.
See the errata page.

October 10. More PA3 errata.
See the errata page for a couple of small fixes for PA3.

October 7. PDF files with lectures slides have been regenerated.
They should now display (and print) all math symbols correctly. Future PDF files should also work correctly. Please notify me if you spot a problem.

October 6. glookup should be working.
glookup can now be used to check your PA1, WA1 and midterm grades.

October 6. Important clarification and bug fixes.
Please see the errata page for an important clarification on PA3 and some bug fixes.

October 5. Bugs in provided solutions.
The solutions we provide for previous programming assignments are not guaranteed to be bug-free. It is your responsibility to properly test your programming assignment, and, if you find a bug in our posted solutions, to either fix it yourself or let us know about it (we will post fixed versions of the solutions as necessary and let you know about it; check the errata page frequently). When you submit PA3, you will also be submitting the PA1 and PA2 code you used, and we will use that to test your assignment. As a bonus, extra credit will be given to the first person / team that identifies a bug in the solution, with a little more extra credit if you show how to fix the bug.

October 4. Using PA1 and PA2 solutions in PA3.
The directions given in the handout for using PA1 and PA2 solutions in PA3 are erroneous. Please see the errata page for correct instructions. Also, if you downloaded the solutions to PA1 and PA2 from this page, please redownload the updated zips below (or from the programming assignments page); the previous zip files were not suitable for importing.

October 3. Midterm 1 solutions.
Midterm 1 solutions are posted. [PS] [PDF]

September 28. Solutions to PA1 and PA2.
Solutions to the programming assignments have been posted.

• Programming assignment 1 [zip]
• Programming assignment 2 [zip]

September 28. Extra office hours.
Tomorrow's extra office hours are as follows: Bowei from 12-2pm, Manu from 3-5pm. All office hours will meet at 511 Soda.

September 28. WA3. The solution has been posted on this web site.

September 25. Midterm I.

On the exam, you are allowed a two-page, hand-written cheat sheet. NOTE: two pages means two sides of one sheet of paper.

September 22. PA2 Submission.

You should submit your project 2 by running submit PA2 from the root directory of your project.

September 22. WA2 Clarifications.

We have a few clarifications on the second written assignment.

• In Problem 1, "A" is the start symbol for the given grammar.
• In Problem 1 Part 2, you only need to give FIRST and FOLLOW sets for non-terminals; FIRST sets for terminals are unnecessary.
• In Problem 1 Part 2, it is standard to add $ to the FOLLOW set of the start non-terminal (in this case "A"), and it may help you in actually showing the LL(1) parse of the string in Part 3. We will accept solutions with and without $.
• For Problem 2, left-factoring is defined as follows. A grammar is left-factored iff no non-terminal has two productions that begin with the same terminal or non-terminal (here each part of a production using | is considered to be a separate production). So, "A -> aA | aB" is illegal in a left-factored grammar, and so is "A -> Ba | Bb".
• In Problem 3, the '*' operator has highest precedence, followed by '.', then '|'.

September 21. Project Submission Addendum.

You will need to include a PARTNERS file in your project submission which lists who your project partners are (yourself included). Please read the errata page for more details.

September 17. CVS and Eclipse.

We have new instructions for setting up CVS and Eclipse that (hopefully) will work; see the instructions page for details. Note that you should still send the email with your group information (details below) if you have not already done so.

September 15. CVS setup.

We are finally ready to set up groups with CVS repositories. As soon as possible, send an email to cs164-tc@imail.cs.berkeley.edu as follows:

• the subject should be "cs164 cvs groups" (without the quotes)
• the body should contain the usernames for the class accounts of the people in your group.

Note that even if you are working by yourself, you should still send an email with only your class account name in the body. You will receive an email in response with the name of your cs164 group account.

For instructions on using CVS while being logged in to an instructional account, see this page. Instructions on using CVS in Eclipse are here.

UPDATE: CVS in Eclipse does not quite work yet. We will post an update once we figure out the problem. CVS should work fine from the instructional accounts.

September 12. WA1 clarification.

Question 1(b):  As you may have noticed, the PA2 handout contains a pseudocode just like the one required in this question.  Feel free to copy
the pseudocode from the handout, but elaborate on how the "transition on next character and epsilon moves" is to be performed.

Question 3: The self-transition on state "3" should be labeled with "1". BTW, the missing label can be inferred from the following facts:

    - the automaton is deterministic,
    - the other transition leaving state "3" is labeled with "0",
    - the alphabet is {'0', '1'}.

September 6. The submission scripts for PA1 have now been configured.

To hand in your assignment, run 'submit PA1' in your top-level source directory (the directory above the edu directory). The script collects all the source files provided in the starter kit, even if you haven't modified some of them. Running the Makefile as indicated in the handout will give you the same instructions.

August 29.  Please send your questions and bug reports to the course newsgroup (which is now accessible from outside the campus, too.)

Thanks to Erik for these instructions on how to access the newsgroup from your home machine: http://www.net.berkeley.edu/usenet/aus/ 

August 29.  The FLR textbook reader is available in Copy Central.

Copy Central is located on Hearst, west from the intersection with Euclid.  (Don't get confused by their abandoned old location around the corner.  Yes, they should have left a forwarding pointer on their old storefront, but alas they are not CS majors.)

They are open 10-5 each day of the long weekend.  The reader costs $35.

August 27.  Error in class accounts handed out during sections.

The new account forms that we handed out during sections today (cs164-da..cs164-hz) have an error in the passwords. There is a leading "2" that should be ignored. So  if your printed password is "2abcdefgh" your real password is just "abcdefgh".  We are sorry for the inconvenience.

August 23.  Class accounts are now available.  They will be handed out during class on Tuesday August 26.

August 21.  Welcome to the CS164 Fall 2003 web site. You will find here lecture notes, assignment handouts and solutions as well as the latest announcements. Make sure to check this web page regularly.

• Class account forms should be available in the week of 8/24/03. When they become available, further instructions will be posted here.

• If you prefer, you may use your named instructional account to do the course project. All you need to do is type register at the shell prompt, then follow the prompts.

If you are on the waiting list:

o   Make sure to file an appeal form in Soda 390 by Friday Aug 29, 5pm!

Last modified: Friday, September 12, 2003 06:46 PM