## Announcements ##
-The seminar meets on Mondays, starting September 13, from 4-6 in the 2nd floor Philosophy Seminar Room, at 5
-Washington Place. We may be able to shift the time around slightly to suit the
-schedule of participants; but it will remain on Mondays late
-afternoon/evenings.
+The seminar meets on Mondays from 4-6, in
+the Linguistics building at 10 Washington Place, in room 104 (back of the first floor).
+We've sent around an email to those who left their email addresses on the roster we passed around. But it's clear that the roster didn't make its way to everyone. So if you didn't receive our email this evening, please email <mailto:jim.pryor@nyu.edu> with your email address, and if you're a student, say whether you expect to audit or take the class for credit.
+All students are invited to help us schedule, and then participate in, a regular student session in addition to the Monday seminar meetings. If you didn't receive our email about this, go to
+<http://www.doodle.com/e8eci7cr9ib8t7t3> as soon as you can and please tell us when you're available.
-## Overview ##
+## Assignments ##
+
+[[Assignment1]]
+
+
+
+##[[Schedule of Topics]]##
+
+[[Using the programming languages]]
+
+##[[Lecture Notes]]##
+
+##[[Offsite Reading]]##
+
+There's lots of links here already to tutorials and encyclopedia entries about many of the notions we'll be dealing with.
+
+
+
+## Course Overview ##
The goal of this seminar is to introduce concepts and techniques from
theoretical computer science and show how they can provide insight
the Curry-Howard isomorphism(s)
monads in category theory and computation
-->
-
+
## Who Can Participate? ##
The course will not presume previous experience with programming. We
modifying, and writing computer programs.
The course will not presume lots of mathematical or logical background, either.
-However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material.
-And it wouldn't be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course
+However, it will demand a certain amount of comfort working with such material; as a result,
+it will not be especially well-suited to be a first graduate-level course
in formal semantics or philosophy of language. If you have concerns about your
background, come discuss them with us.
-It hasn't yet been decided whether this course counts for satisfying the logic requirement for
-Philosophy PhD students.
+This class will count as satisfying the logic requirement for Philosophy
+PhD students; however if this would be your first or only serious
+engagement with graduate-level formal work you should consider
+carefully, and must discuss with us, (1) whether you'll be adequately
+prepared for this course, and (2) whether you'd be better served by
+taking a logic course (at a neighboring department, or at NYU next year)
+with a more canonical syllabus.
-Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are wlecome
+
+Faculty and students from outside of NYU Linguistics and Philosophy are welcome
to audit, to the extent that this coheres well with the needs of our local
students.
what that means during the course.
* **Scheme** is one of two major dialects of *Lisp*, which is a large family
-of programming languages. The other dialect is called "CommonLisp." Scheme
+of programming languages. Scheme
is the more clean and minimalistic dialect, and is what's mostly used in
academic circles.
-
Scheme itself has umpteen different "implementations", which share most of
their fundamentals, but have slightly different extensions and interact with
the operating system differently. One major implementation used to be called
This is what we recommend you use. (If you're already using or comfortable with
another Scheme implementation, though, there's no compelling reason to switch.)
+ Racket stands to Scheme in something like the relation Firefox stands to HTML.
+
* **Caml** is one of two major dialects of *ML*, which is another large
-family of programming languages. The other dialect is called "SML" and has
-several implementations. But Caml has only one active implementation,
+family of programming languages. Caml has only one active implementation,
OCaml, developed by the INRIA academic group in France.
-* Those of your with some programming background may have encountered a third
+* Those of you with some programming background may have encountered a third
prominent functional programming language, **Haskell**. This is also used a
lot in the academic contexts we'll be working through. Its surface syntax
-differs from OCaml, and there are various important things one can do in
-each of Haskell and Ocaml that one can't (or can't as easily) do in the
+differs from Caml, and there are various important things one can do in
+each of Haskell and Caml that one can't (or can't as easily) do in the
other. But these languages also have a lot in common, and if you're
familiar with one of them, it's not difficult to move between it and the
other.
[[How to get the programming languages running on your computer]]
-
-## Recommended Readings ##
+
+[[Family tree of functional programming languages]]
+
+
+## Recommended Books ##
+
+It's not necessary to purchase these for the class. But they are good ways to get a more thorough and solid understanding of some of the more basic conceptual tools we'll be using.
* *An Introduction to Lambda Calculi for Computer Scientists*, by Chris
Hankin, currently $17 on
[Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Lambda-Calculi-Computer-Scientists/dp/0954300653).
+* (Another good book covering the same ground as the Hankin book, but
+more thoroughly, and in a more mathematical style, is *Lambda-Calculus and Combinators:
+an Introduction*, by J. Roger Hindley and Jonathan P. Seldin. If you choose to read
+both the Hankin book and this book, you'll notice the authors made some different
+terminological/notational choices. At first, this makes comprehension slightly slower,
+but in the long run it's helpful because it makes the arbitrariness of those choices more salient.)
+
+
* *The Little Schemer, Fourth Edition*, by Daniel P. Friedman and Matthias
Felleisen, currently $23 on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262560992).
This is a classic text introducing the gentle art of programming, using the
* *The Little MLer*, by Matthias Felleisen and Daniel P. Friedman, currently $27
on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/Little-MLer-Matthias-Felleisen/dp/026256114X).
This covers some of the same introductory ground as The Little Schemer, but
-this time in ML. The dialect of ML used is SML, not OCaml, but there are only
-superficial syntactic differences between these languages.
-
-
+this time in ML. It uses another dialect of ML (called SML), instead of OCaml, but there are only
+superficial syntactic differences between these languages. [Here's a translation
+manual between them](http://www.mpi-sws.org/~rossberg/sml-vs-ocaml.html).
-## Schedule of Topics ##
-To be added.
----