Advanced programming concepts in a course on grammars and parsing

Abstract

One of the important goals of the Computer Science curriculum at Utrecht University is to familiarize students with abstract programming concepts such as, for example, partial evaluation and deforestation. A course on grammars and parsing offers excellent possibilities for exemplifying and introducing such concepts. We have developed a course that exemplifies higher-order functions and lazy evaluation, and introduces abstract programming concepts such as partial evaluation, generic programming, deforestation, and abstract interpretation. This paper describes how we deal with these concepts in the course on grammars and parsing.