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.
-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.
of programming languages. The other dialect is called "CommonLisp." 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
several implementations. But 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.
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
this time in ML. The dialect of ML used is SML, not OCaml, but there are only
superficial syntactic differences between these languages.
+# Other resources #
+
+* [Barker's Lambda Tutorial](http://homepages.nyu.edu/~cb125/Lambda): tutorial with embedded Javascript code that enables a user to type a lambda form into a web browser page and click to execute (reduce) it.
+* [Penn Lambda Calculator](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/lambda/): requires installing Java, but provides a number of tools for evaluating lambda expressions and other linguistic forms.
+
+##[[Schedule of Topics]]##
+
+##[[Lecture Notes]]##
+##[[Offsite Reading]]##
-## Schedule of Topics ##
+There's lots of links here already to tutorials and encyclopedia entries about many of the notions we'll be dealing with.
-To be added.
----