Course of Theoretical Computer Science (Informatica Teorica) 2010-2011.

First Year of the Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica.
Departament of Informatics, Systems, and Production.

Teacher: Alberto Pettorossi.  CurriculumVitae.
You can talk to the teacher after the lectures or by appointment. 

Lectures: from 28.02.11 to 25.06.11
Monday 16:00-17:45 (Room 03 n.e.)
Wednesday 14:00-15:45 (Room 03 n.e.)

Exams and Seminars.
Same time and place as the exams of the course: Automi, Linguaggi e Traduttori.
Please, visit that site.

Exam registration: send to the teacher (pettorossi@info.uniroma2.it)
seven days before the day of the call an email
with the subject: ite2011_Lastname_Firstname_RegistrationNumber
and the message:
'Desidero prenotarmi per l'appello del day/month/year.
Ho svolto il take-home-exam da solo. First_name Family_name'
You should attach (in .pdf format) a report of the solutions of the take-home-exam.
Normally, you cannot register to more than one exam calls per exam session
and no more than three exam calls per academic year.

On the day of the written exam you should hand-in a paper report
with the solution of the take-home-exam.
On the day of the oral exam you should come with a PC with the programs
of the project A1 (or the projects A1 and A2), ready for execution.

Learning Objectives. The course offers an overview of the methods for the definition
of the semantics of the imperative, functional, logic, and concurrent programming languages.
Those methods deepen the logical and algebraic understanding of various techniques
for specifying and verifying properties of programs written in those languages.
Some programming projects and the use of suitable software tools will
reinforce the understanding of the theoretical notions.

Detailed Syllabus and Exam Questions.
Take-home-exam: to be done by yourself.
Syllabus.
1. Decidability and Turing computability. Partial Recursive Functions.
2. Structural induction, well-founded induction, and rule induction. Recursion Theorem.
3. Operational, denotational, and axiomatic semantics of an imperative language.
   Hoare's triples for partial correctness. Hoare's calculus: soundness and relative completeness.
4. Operational and denotational semantics of a first order functional language:
   call-by-value and call-by-name regimes.
5. Domain theory. A metalanguage for denotational semantics. Bekic's Theorem.
   Inclusive predicates and proofs of properties of functional programs.
6. Operational and denotational semantics of a higher order functional language: eager semantics
   and lazy semantics. Fixpoint operators. Beta and eta rules. Adequacy and full abstraction.
7. Operational and denotational semantics of Horn-clause programs.
8. Dijkstra's nondeterministic guarded commands. Owicki-Gries rules for parallel commands.
   Milner's calculus for communicating concurrent processes.
9. mu-calculus and proofs of communicating systems and protocols. Local model-checking.

Requirements for the course: Fundamental notions of Computer Science. Algorithms and Data Structures.
Elements of Algebra and elements of Predicate Calculus.
Attendance to lectures is compulsory.
Previous Exam Questions
Statistics of the outcome of previous exam sessions.

Exam Information:
(i) Marks: 18 - 20: 10 exercises of the take-home-exam + Project A1 + Written and Oral Exam.
(ii) Marks: 21 - 25: 10 exercises of the take-home-exam + Projects A1 and A2 + Written and Oral Exam.
(iii) Marks: 26 – 30L: all exercises of the take-home-exam + Projects A1 and A2 + Written and Oral Exam.

Books:
Pettorossi, A.: Semantics of Programming Languages. Second Edition. Aracne Editrice, 2011.
[P] Pettorossi, A.: Elements of Computability, Decidability, and Complexity, Third Edition.
Aracne Editrice, 2009.
[PL] Pettorossi, A., Proietti, M.: First Order Predicate Calculus and Logic Programming,
Second Edition, Aracne Editrice, 2005.

Book for further reading:
[Wi] Winskel, G.: The Formal Semantics of Programming Languages: An Introduction,
The MIT Press (1993) (Also available in Italian).
Errata Corrige
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