The Racket School of Semantics and Languages 2017

Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler, Matthew Flatt, Shriram Krishnamurthi, Jay McCarthy, and Justin Pombrio

This summer school introduces attendees to the Racket philosophy of analyzing, modeling, and building languages.

The table below presents a concise summer school schedule. Most sessions will consist of a lecture part and a hands-on lab. Our goal is to lecture for less than 90 minutes and to give you at least 120 minutes of lab time. The lectures will introduce basic ideas; the labs will present practical exercises on these topics. We will have a break between lectures and labs.

By Wednesday afternoon, you might be exhausted from the breakneck speed of the school. Shriram K. will lecture on his experience with semantics re-engineering, but no lab is scheduled. Instead, feel free to hike a mountain, swim in the salt lake, or explore the U and SLC in any way you feel comfortable. If you’d rather hang around and work on something, some of us will be available to help you along.

Thursday afternoon Matthew F. will take you from extending languages to building complete languages. You will use a small amount of this material on Friday morning to build your first "hash lang."

Robby F.’s Friday afternoon lecture will cover his experience with random testing and how to best use Redex’s current random-testing facilities. Again, no lab is scheduled to follow this lecture. Instead, feel free to pick our individual and collective brains about various issues concerning languages, semantics, teaching and other related issues.

Postscript These notes have been adjusted to reflect the actual summer school schedule and have been updated with links to code and other materials used during the lectures and labs.

		Morning (9:00 – 12:30)		Afternoon (13:30 – 17:00)
Monday		From the Lambda Calculus to Redex		Modeling Functional Expression Languages
		Lab Playing with PCF-value		Lab Modeling PCF-value
Tuesday		Modeling Functional Languages		Lab The Mystery Languages of Functions
		Lab The Mystery Languages of Records
Wednesday		Modeling Imperative-Functional Languages		Lab The Mystery Languages of Variables
		Lab Modeling Event Loops		Shriram K. Semantics Re-engineering
Thursday		Extending Languages		Matthew F. Building Languages
		Lab Practice with Macros		Lab Practice with Hash Langs
Friday		Lab Testing Models, Testing Languages		Robby F. Advanced Testing
		Specification vs Implementation		consult with staff

Figure 1: Workshop schedule