Exam Information

CS536-S25 Intro to PLs and Compilers

On this page: Midterm Exam 1 | Midterm Exam 2 | Final Exam

There are two midterm exams and one final exam worth a total of 60% of your grade. Midterm exam 1 is worth 18% of your grade, midterm exam 2 is worth 16% of your grade, and the final exam is worth 26% of your grade.

	Date	Time	Location
Midterm Exam 1	Thursday, February 27	6:30 - 8 pm	in class
Midterm Exam 2	Thursday, March 20	6:30 - 8 pm
Final Exam	Thursday, May 8	6:30 - 8:30 pm

Exams are closed-book and consist of multiple-choice, short-answer,and written questions. The final will be cumulative but with the majority of the exam on the topics covered since the second midterm. You are responsible for material covered in the lectures, readings, and assignments. Note that some details may be covered in the readings but not in the lecture and vice versa.

Conflicts: Any exam conflicts must be brought to Beck's attention during the three weeks of class (or as soon as you find out about it) by emailing Beck (hasti@cs.wisc.edu).

You MUST bring your student ID to identify yourself.

Midterm Exam 1

Thursday, February 27, 6:30 - 8 pm

Topics

Scanning
- General: what does a scanner do; how does it fit into the design of a compiler?
- Underlying model: finite-state machines (FSMs); deterministic vs. non-deterministics FSMs; translating regular expressions to NFAs, translating NFAs to DFAs
- Specification of a scanner: regular expressions; JLex specifications (you do NOT need to know all of JLex's special characters)
Context-Free Grammars: Specification of a language's syntax via a context-free grammar (CFG)
- derivations (leftmost, rightmost)
- parse trees
- expression grammars (precedence, associativity)
- list grammars
- ambiguous grammars
- recursive grammar (left recursive, right recursive)
Syntax-Directed Translation: "plain" translations
- writing rules of the form "S1.trans = ..."
- being able to define translations of any types (integer, AST nodes, ...)
You should be able to do the following:
- Given an English description of a language, write the appropriate finite-state machine (FSM), regular expression (RE), or context-free grammar (CFG). For an expression language, the CFG's parse trees should correctly reflect the precedences and associativities of the operators.
- Given an English definition of a language and a faulty FSM, RE, or CFG, find and fix the problems.
- Given a CFG and a syntax-directed translation goal, define the translation rules. Given an input string, draw the parse tree and annotate each nonterminal in the tree with its translation.

Covers material from

Lectures: 1/23 through 2/13

On-line Notes: Overview , Scanning , JLex , Context-free Grammars , Syntax-directed Translation

Programming Assignments: P1, P2

Additional information

Do bring: your UW Student ID

Do NOT bring: notes, computers, PDAs, cell phones, pages, MP3 players, smart watches, etc.

For additional practice with concepts, see Homework 0 (solution), Homework 1 (solution), and Homework 2 (solution)

A sample midterm (and solution) is available. Note that this sample midterm is from an offering of the course that had just one midterm and a final and so it covers more material than Midterm Exam 1 will. In particular, Question 1, Question 3 (parts a and b), and Question 4 are relevant for Midterm Exam 1 (the remainder will be relevant for Midterm Exam 2).

Midterm Exam 2

Thursday, March 20, 6:30 - 8 pm

more information to be posted closer to the exam date

Final Exam

Thursday, May 8, 6:30 - 8:30 pm