Blue - A Language for Teaching Object-Oriented Programming

Teaching object-oriented programming has clearly become an important part of computer science education. We agree with many others that the best place to teach it is in the CS1 introductory course. Many problems with this have been reported in the literature. These mainly result from inadequate languages and environments. Blue is a new language and integrated programming environment, currently under development explicitly for object-oriented teaching. We expect clear advantages from the use of Blue for first year teaching compared to using other available languages. This paper describes the design principles on which the language was based and the most important aspects of the language itself

The NOMAD system : expectation-based detection and correction of errors during understanding of syntactically and semantically ill-formed text

Most large text-understanding systems have been designed under the assumption that the input text will be in reasonably "neat" form (for example, newspaper stories and other edited texts). However, a great deal of natural language text (for example, memos, messages, rough drafts, conversation transcripts, etc.) have features that differ significantly from "neat" texts, posing special problems for readers, such as misspelled words, missing words, poor syntactic construction, unclear or ambiguous interpretation, missing crucial punctuation, etc. Our solution to these problems is to make use of expectations, based both on knowledge of surface English and on world knowledge of the situation being described. These syntactic and semantic expectations can be used to figure out unknown words from context, constrain the possible word senses of words with multiple meanings (ambiguity), fill in missing words (ellipsis), and resolve referents (anaphora). This method of using expectations to aid the understanding of "scruffy" texts has bee incorporated into a working computer program called NOMAD, which understands scruffy texts in the domain of Navy ship-to-shore messages

The AutoProof Verifier: Usability by Non-Experts and on Standard Code

Formal verification tools are often developed by experts for experts; as a result, their usability by programmers with little formal methods experience may be severely limited. In this paper, we discuss this general phenomenon with reference to AutoProof: a tool that can verify the full functional correctness of object-oriented software. In particular, we present our experiences of using AutoProof in two contrasting contexts representative of non-expert usage. First, we discuss its usability by students in a graduate course on software verification, who were tasked with verifying implementations of various sorting algorithms. Second, we evaluate its usability in verifying code developed for programming assignments of an undergraduate course. The first scenario represents usability by serious non-experts; the second represents usability on "standard code", developed without full functional verification in mind. We report our experiences and lessons learnt, from which we derive some general suggestions for furthering the development of verification tools with respect to improving their usability.Comment: In Proceedings F-IDE 2015, arXiv:1508.0338

Metamodel-based model conformance and multiview consistency checking

Model-driven development, using languages such as UML and BON, often makes use of multiple diagrams (e.g., class and sequence diagrams) when modeling systems. These diagrams, presenting different views of a system of interest, may be inconsistent. A metamodel provides a unifying framework in which to ensure and check consistency, while at the same time providing the means to distinguish between valid and invalid models, that is, conformance. Two formal specifications of the metamodel for an object-oriented modeling language are presented, and it is shown how to use these specifications for model conformance and multiview consistency checking. Comparisons are made in terms of completeness and the level of automation each provide for checking multiview consistency and model conformance. The lessons learned from applying formal techniques to the problems of metamodeling, model conformance, and multiview consistency checking are summarized

A Data Transformation System for Biological Data Sources

Scientific data of importance to biologists in the Human Genome Project resides not only in conventional databases, but in structured files maintained in a number of different formats (e.g. ASN.1 and ACE) as well a.s sequence analysis packages (e.g. BLAST and FASTA). These formats and packages contain a number of data types not found in conventional databases, such as lists and variants, and may be deeply nested. We present in this paper techniques for querying and transforming such data, and illustrate their use in a prototype system developed in conjunction with the Human Genome Center for Chromosome 22. We also describe optimizations performed by the system, a crucial issue for bulk data

EMBODIMENT IN SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING

This paper aims to elaborate the implementation of Embodiment as one of the concept of Cognitive Linguistics in second language learning and teaching. Cognitive Linguistics is simply pointed that language is all about meaning. It views the learner as a thinking being and an active processor of information. However, it is interesting as we found that mind and body are not separate entities. Involved in understanding what people say to us and what we read, Embodiment relates meanings directly to our physical experience; it emphasizes on the way cognition is shaped by the body and its sensorimotor interaction with the world. Furthermore, this paper is trying to show how the theoretical assumptions, basic units, and constructs used in Cognitive Linguistics offer a better understanding of the true nature of language and grammar, and how Embodiment may improve current second language teaching and learning methods

An algorithm for generating abstract syntax trees

The notion of an abstract syntax is discussed. An algorithm is presented for automatically deriving an abstract syntax directly from a BNF grammar. The implementation of this algorithm and its application to the grammar for Modula are discussed