Department of Computing and Information Science
Queen's U.

CISC-223 SOFTWARE SPECIFICATIONS, WINTER 2024

Course Description - winter 2024


Textbook Instructor Goals of the Course Software


Required textbook

Supplementary reading

Suggested additional reading may be found in the Introductions to Parts A and C and in the additional-reading section at the end of every chapter in the text.

There are many textbooks covering the material in the first half of the course (Part C in our textbook).


Instructor

Teaching assistants: For information on the teaching assistants please login to your CISC223 onQ page.


Goals of the course

The first part of the course provides an introduction to several conceptual tools that are widely used in computing: state diagrams, regular expressions and context-free grammars. In the second part you will learn to verify the correctness of (small) programs using logic based techniques. This part of the course builds on material you have studied, for example, in CISC 204. Additionally, we will briefly discuss the theoretical limits of algorithmic computation.

Learning Outcomes

CISC/CMPE223 considers the standard School of Computing syllabus https://www.cs.queensu.ca/students/undergraduate/syllabus/ to be part of the syllabus.

Academic Integrity

Please see a Statement on Academic Integrity from the Arts and Science web site posted here.


Software

Programming Language

A small fragment of the C programming language is used in the text. A compact reference manual may be found in Appendix A of the text book and
on-line as a PDF file.

The text assumes that a file specdef.i of "headers" and definitions has been included into all programs; this is Program 3 on page 7 of the text.

An on-line reference manual on C programming:

Programming Platforms

Any implementation of C (or C++) may be used, but for this course we recommend an interpretive implementation of C called EiC. Although its run-time performance is relatively poor (comparable to Java), it has good error messages and run-time checks.

EiC has been installed on the CASLab Linux servers and workstations. For more information about accessing CASLab Linux, consult the CASLab How To.

To use EiC to parse and run a C program file prog.c in the current directory, just enter a

eic prog.c
at a command-line prompt. Use re-direction to read from a file input or to write to a file output, as in
eic prog.c < input > output
To get a summary of available command-line options and directives, enter
eic -h
For more details see the link EiC.

The following on-line tutorials will be useful if you are unfamiliar with Unix-like systems:

Several other free C or C++ implementations which may be of interest are available:

Program Editors

Any text editor (such as Notepad on Windows) may be used to create and modify C programs. We suggest you use one window as a command-line interface (running EiC as necessary), and a separate window (or windows) to edit C source files.

On Unix-like systems such as Solaris and Linux, the most popular text editors are vi (or an improved version such as vim) and emacs (or an improved version such as xemacs); but if you are not familiar with either of these, we advise you to use nedit at a GUI (graphical user interface) and jed at a CLI (command-line interface).

An "integrated development environment" (IDE) combining a program editor, a compiler or interpreter, and possibly a debugger, won't be needed for the relatively small and, one hopes, verified programs you will be coding in this course.

PDF Readers

Assignments and other documents posted at this web site will be in Portable Document Format (PDF). The CASLab computers you use should have PDF viewers installed.

If you want to install a PDF viewer on your own computer, viewers for most platforms are available at no charge here: