Home/ Questions/Q 297671
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-12T06:39:40+00:00

Hey. I’m taking a course titled Principles of Programming Languages, and I need to

  • 0

Hey. I’m taking a course titled Principles of Programming Languages, and I need to decide on a project to do this summer. Here is a short version of what the project needs to accomplish:

“The nature of the project is language processing. Writing a Scheme/Lisp processor is a project of this type. A compiler for a language like C or Pascal is also a potential project of this type. Some past students have done projects related to databases and processing SQL. Another possible project might relate to pattern matching and manipulating XML. Lisp, Pascal, and C usually result in the most straight forward projects.”

I am very interested in web technologies, and have some experience with PHP, MySql, JavaScript, etc. and I would like to do something web oriented, but I’m having trouble coming up with any ideas. I also want this to be a worthwhile project that could have some significance, instead of just doing the same thing as everyone else in class.

Any ideas? Thanks!

EDIT: I really like the idea of a Latex to XHTML/MathML translator, and I passed the idea to my instructor, in which he wrote back:

“I think the idea is interesting, my question (and yours) is whether it is appropriate.

I think of LateX as a low-level mark-up language. I’m wondering if converting this to XHTML or MathML is really a change in levels and complexity. I think you can make your point with a little more discussion and some examples. You might also think of some other mark-up constructs which made it easier to describe equations.”

Any ideas on how to convince him this may be appropriate, or any extensions of this idea that could work for the goals of my project?

Thanks for all the responses so far!

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I finished this course last semester 🙂

    IMHO the best way to go is to build an expression evaluator. build the simplest expression evaluator you can.

    Then add these features in order as many as you like:

    1– constant symbols, just place holders for variables. your evaluator should ask for their values after parsing the expression.

    2– imperative-style variables. Like variables in any imperative language, where the user can change the value of a symbol anywhere in code.

    3– simple control-statements. ‘if-else’ and pretest while loop are the simplest to consider.

    4– arrays. if you really want your expression evaluator to be really like a programming language. It would be interesting if you add variable dimension arrays to your ‘language’. you have to build a generic mapping function for your arrays.

    Now you got a real programming language. To be a useful one, you might add subroutines.
    so the list continuous:

    5– subroutines. This is little harder than previous features, but it should not be impossible 🙂

    6– build a simple math library for your new language in your language it self! and that is the fun part in my opinion 😉

    Sebest book is a good book to overview famous imperative programming languages.

    • 0