Standard Pascal: User Reference Manual
Standard Pascal: User Reference Manual
Introduction To Automata Theory, Languages, And Computation
Introduction To Automata Theory, Languages, And Computation
Self-reference is an illustrative essential
SIGCSE '94 Proceedings of the twenty-fifth SIGCSE symposium on Computer science education
Integrating a breadth-first curriculum with relevant programming projects in CS1/CS2
SIGCSE '95 Proceedings of the twenty-sixth SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
Recursion in gradual steps (is recursion really that difficult?)
Proceedings of the thirty-first SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education
A first problem for the algorithms course (poster session)
Proceedings of the 6th annual conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
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This paper is a guided tour through the first day of a CS 1 course. It discusses teaching Extended Backus-Naur Form (EBNF) as the first topic—not to facilitate presenting the syntax of a programming language, but because EBNF is a microcosm of programming. With no prerequisites, students are introduced to a variety of fundamental concepts in programming: formal systems, abstraction, control structures, equivalence of descriptions, the difference between syntax and semantics, and the relative power of recursion versus iteration. As a non-numeric formal system, EBNF provides a small but concrete context in which to study all these topics.EBNF descriptions include abstraction (named rules) and the four fundamental control structures (sequence, decision, repetition, and recursion). Because there are no data or parameters in EBNF, it is easy to sidestep tricky issues surrounding variables, scope, assignment statements, and parameter modes. Describing entitles in EBNF is similar to describing computations in a programming language. Students learn to read a description and analyze whether it generates/matches candidate symbols; then they learn to synthesize descriptions from English specifications, augmented by legal and illegal exemplars of symbols.All these concepts can be covered in one lecture, establishing a high level of formality early in the course, while foreshadowing actual programming language features and techniques to be covered later. Of course, learning EBNF also facilitates presenting the syntax of a programming language concisely during the rest of the course.