Assessment

Assessment for the academic year 2011-12: Deadline: 27 April, 12PM. Assessment sample answer here

Getting practice

Addition (June 2010): Questions and answers of the exam of May 2010 (below)

Template showing the rough exam format for 2009-2010

The practical/tutorial pages contain a fair number of questions that allow you to get practice with the topics of the course. Everything there is potentially relevant for your exam. You may also want to look at old exams, but that's less straightforward. The course CS3518, taught for the first time in 2009-2010, combines elements of the courses CS4026 (which in turn developed from the ancient CS4018), CS3511, and CS3012. It's therefore difficult to find an old exam that covers all CS3518's topics (formal languages; functional programming; computability) and nothing else (e.g., no logic programming; no complexity theory; no "concepts of programming languages"). To find old exam questions about each of these topics, you will have look at a number of old exams, and use your common sense to see which parts of each exam are relevant for CS3518. (If it's not discussed in the lectures and/or practicals, there won't be exam questions about it.) Here are some notes to guide you.

Questions about Finite State Automata and Regular Expressions can be found in old exams for CS3012. (Questions about other topics, such as pushdown automata, grammars, and compilers, are irrelevant for you.) See exams about formal languages and compilers

Questions about Lambda calculus/Haskell can be found in papers for CS4018 and CS4026. For Haskell, focus on exams from 2004-5 onwards. (Before that, a different functional programming language, Miranda, was used).

Questions about Turing machines and computability can be found in exam papers for CS4018 and CS4026 from 2004-5 onwards. (Make sure not to get lost in questions about computational complexity, since this topic is not covered in CS3518.)

Some previous exam papers (and some answers) are listed below. See also the University's exam database.

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