1 Organization of Programming Languages (CMSC 330)🔗

Term: Fall, 2026

Professor: Anwar Mamat (he/him)

Email: anwar@umd.edu

Credits: 3

Prerequisites: a grade of C or better in CMSC216 and CMSC250.

Course Dates: From August 31 to December 15

Lectures: TuTh, 9:30am - 10:45am, IRB 0324

2 Course Description🔗

A study of programming languages, focusing on their paradigms, features, design, and implementation. We will look at syntax, semantics, and structure in OCaml and Rust while also looking at other regular, context-free, and Turing complete languages. We will explore why so many languages exist, despite the fact that we really only need assembly.

3 Learning Outcomes🔗

After taking this course, you should be able to:

• Construct and analyze regular expressions and finite automata to recognize regular languages

• Construct context-free grammars and use parsing techniques to analyze the syntax of languages

• Apply functional programming concepts including recursion, type inference, polymorphism, higher-order functions, scoping, modularity, and abstraction

• Recognize language features and analyze their effects on problem solving

• Perform type inference on statements and expressions in statically typed languages

• Solve problems both imperatively and functionally

• Read and write proofs about the correctness of a program

• Explain and evaluate programs using the fundamental concepts and reduction rules of the lambda calculus

• Use operational semantics to formally describe and reason about program execution

• Explain and compare memory management and garbage collection techniques and their trade-offs

• Identify common security vulnerabilities and apply appropriate design and implementation techniques to defend against attacks

• Modify and create programming languages to fit a given set of requirements

4 Grading🔗

You are responsible for all material covered in lecture and discussion, as well as any information posted on the class web page such as announcements, deadlines, policies, etc. During the semester we may provide ungraded homework exercises for additional practice. While we will not collect these exercises, completing them is essential preparation for exams. You may work together on these ungraded homeworks, and you may of course come to office hours for additional help.

Here is probably the part you care about though:

Final letter grades are assigned following this grading scheme:

This table uses interval notation, so "(x,y]" means any number less than x and greater than or equal to y.

5 Programming Projects🔗

Projects must be submitted electronically following the instructions given in class. Projects may not be submitted by any other means (e.g., please do not email your projects to us). It is your responsibility to test your program and verify that it works properly before submitting. All projects are due at 11:59pm on the day indicated on the project assignment, according to the Gradescope’s internal clock.

Projects may be submitted up to 24 hours late for a 10% penalty. Note that your project score as it appears on Gradescope may not include any late penalties. Any penalties will be incorporated into the final project grade on ELMS. If you submit both on time and late, your project will receive the maximum of your latest on-time score and your penalty-adjusted late score.

Project extensions will not be granted due to system problems, network problems, power outages, etc., so do not wait to submit a project until the night it is due. You may submit multiple times up to the deadline, and only your active submission on Gradescope is graded. Similarly, if you submit late, only your latest submission before the late deadline will be considered. It is your responsibility to ensure that your submission with the highest score is the active submission on Gradescope. By default, the active submission is the latest one you have submitted. You can activate a previous submission under "Submission History" for an assignment. No consideration in grading will be made for errors made in transferring files or submitting the wrong version of your project. Having a working, un-submitted version will not count; only submitted code will be counted.

Your projects will be graded based on test cases not provided in advance. Because grading is done automatically, you must follow the project specification exactly. Also, while projects will generally not be graded on style or documentation, we reserve the right to manually grade program source code for some projects.

Finally, any "hard coding" in a project assignment may result in a score of zero for that project, and is considered a bad-faith effort. Hard coding refers to attempting to make a program appear as if it works correctly, when in fact it does not. One example of hard coding would be printing the desired output instead of computing it. This is only one example, and if you have any questions as to what constitutes hard coding, be sure to ask ahead of time.

Do not share or publicly post your project solutions online; doing so constitutes a violation of academic integrity. This issue is discussed in greater detail below.

6 Clicker Quizzes🔗

Clicker quizzes will be administered during class lectures using https://buzzer.cs.umd.edu. You can answer the questions using your phone, iPad, or laptop, but you must be present in the classroom to receive credit. Quizzes are graded on correctness, and we drop 20% of the clicker questions given over the semester. That means if there are 100 clicker questions during the semester, you receive full credit for answering 80 of them correctly.

7 Meet the Professor🔗

Each student is required to meet with the professor at least once during the semester. The meeting may be used to discuss the student’s academic interests, career goals, experiences, or any other topic the student would like to share.

A meeting held solely for the purpose of seeking help with coursework during regular office hours does not satisfy this requirement. To receive credit for the required meeting, students should explicitly indicate that they are meeting with the professor to fulfill the semester meeting requirement.

8 Discussion Exercises🔗

In some discussions there will be graded work. This work will be due on Gradescope at 11:59pm the day after the discussion. The exercises will be made available online. They could be coding exercises or worksheets. Some will be graded for completion, some will be graded on correctness.

9 Exams and Quizzes🔗

There will be two midterm exams and six quizzes throughout the semester. All of them are in-person, proctored, and taken on your own computer through the PrairieTest platform. Exams are 75 minutes long and quizzes are 50 minutes long.

Before your first exam, you must install the required software (the lockdown browser) and you must bring a fully charged laptop to every exam and quiz. If your laptop crashes or runs out of battery during an exam, it is your responsibility. If you do not have a laptop, you can borrow one from the UMD library.

You get two attempts at every exam and quiz. If you would like to improve your grade with a second attempt, reserve another sitting on PrairieTest after the first one, then go to the exam room and take it again. Questions are randomized, so your second attempt will contain a similar but different set of questions. The exam rooms are open at the following times:

• Monday, Wednesday, Friday 12:00-1:50pm, CSI 2107

• Tuesday, Thursday 5:00-6:00pm, CSI 2117

The grade from your most recent exam attempt, rather than the highest grade, will be counted. Therefore, if you receive a 60 on your first attempt, you are strongly encouraged to take the exam again. However, if you receive a 90, you should retake the exam only if you are confident that you can perform better on your second attempt.

10 AI Usage Policy🔗

Students are encouraged to use AI tools as learning assistants, tutors, and teaching assistants to support their understanding of course concepts. For example, students may use AI to ask questions, clarify difficult concepts, review their work, identify potential errors, or obtain additional explanations and examples.

However, students must implement all assignments and projects themselves. AI tools may not be used to generate, substantially write, or implement the solution to an assignment or project on the student’s behalf. The purpose of the assignments is for students to develop and demonstrate their own programming and problem-solving skills.

Students should also be aware that project material may be assessed through proctored exams and quizzes. Questions on exams and quizzes may require students to explain, modify, reproduce, or apply concepts and techniques used in their projects. Students who rely on AI to implement their projects without developing a genuine understanding of the material are therefore likely to perform poorly on these assessments.

Ultimately, you are responsible for knowing and understanding the code and concepts in your assignments and projects. If you cannot independently demonstrate your understanding during a proctored exam or quiz, you should expect to lose credit on the corresponding material.

11 Outside-of-class communication with course staff🔗

We will interact with students outside of class in primarily four ways: during office hours, electronically via Piazza, electronically via e-mail, and electronically via the class webpage. The large majority of communication should employ the first two methods, reserving e-mail for personal (presumably rare) circumstances. The class webpage will host announcements (all of which will also be on Piazza).

Personalized assistance, e.g., with programming assignments or exam preparation, will be provided during office hours. You are responsible for developing and debugging your own programs. Do not rely on the instructional staff to make your project work. Lower-level CMSC courses provide extensive debugging and development help in office hours, but upper-level CMSC courses expect students to complete projects with minimal extra help. Therefore in CMSC 330, we will provide less debugging help than some students may be used to. If you come in with a question, expect to be pointed in the right direction, but it will be up to you to finish solving the problem on your own. Office hours for the instructional staff will be posted on the course web page a few days into the semester.

Additional assistance will be provided via the Piazza web forum. You may use this forum to ask general questions of interest to the class as a whole, e.g., administrative issues or project clarification questions. The course staff will monitor Piazza on a daily basis, but do not expect immediate answers to questions. Please do not post publicly any information that would violate the university academic integrity policy (e.g., project code or test cases).

Piazza allows students to post private questions that are only visible to instructors. Please use this feature if you wish to ask specific questions concerning your project solutions. Generally it will also be helpful to submit your current project code to Gradescope, so instructors and TAs can try running your code on their machines before answering your questions.

Personal e-mail to instructors or TAs should be reserved for issues that cannot be handled by the above methods. If you must email an instructor please make sure the subject line includes [CMSC330] (brackets included!). If this is not in the header, I cannot guarantee a quick response to your communications.

Important announcements will be made primarily in class but sometimes on the class web page, and via Piazza.

12 Excused Absences🔗

Any student who needs to be excused for an absence from a single lecture, recitation, or discussion due to illness shall:

1. Make a reasonable attempt to inform the instructor of their illness prior to the class.

2. Upon returning to the class, present their instructor with a self-signed note attesting to the date of their illness. Each note must contain an acknowledgment by the student that the information provided is true and correct. Providing false information to University officials is prohibited under Part 9(h) of the Code of Student Conduct (V-1.00(B) University of Maryland Code of Student Conduct) and may result in disciplinary action.

Missing an exam segment for reasons such as illness, religious observance, participation in required university activities, or family or personal emergency (such as a serious automobile accident or close relative’s funeral) will be excused so long as the absence is requested in writing at least 2 days in advance and the student includes documentation that shows the absence qualifies as excused; a self-signed note is not sufficient as exams and quizzes are Major Scheduled Grading Events. For this class, such events are the two midterms, the final exam, and the quizzes.

For medical absences, you must furnish documentation from the health care professional who treated you. This documentation must verify dates of treatment and indicate the timeframe that the student was unable to meet academic responsibilities. In addition, it must contain the name and phone number of the medical service provider to be used if verification is needed. No diagnostic information will ever be requested. Note that simply being seen by a health care professional does not constitute an excused absence; it must be clear that you were unable to perform your academic duties.

For absences due to the death of a family member, a death certificate, obituary, or any other information related to death services must be provided. This is only related to deaths that occurred during the semester. For death anniversary observations, University religious observance policies apply (See next section).

It is the University’s policy to provide accommodations for students with religious observances conflicting with exams, but it is your responsibility to inform the instructor in advance of intended religious observances. If you have a conflict with one of the planned exams, you must inform us prior to the end of the first two weeks of the class. Failure to give advance notice may result in accommodations not being able to be met in a timely manner.

For missed exams due to excused absences, the instructor will arrange a makeup exam. If you might miss an exam for any reason other than those above, you must contact the instructor in advance to discuss the circumstances. We are not obligated to offer a substitute assignment or to provide a makeup exam unless the failure to perform was due to an excused absence.

The policies for excused absences do not apply to project assignments. Projects will be assigned with sufficient time to be completed by students who have a reasonable understanding of the necessary material and begin promptly. In cases of extremely serious documented illness of lengthy duration or other protracted, severe emergency situations, the instructor may consider extensions on project assignments, depending upon the specific circumstances.

13 Academic Integrity🔗

The Campus Senate has adopted a policy asking students to include the following statement on each examination or assignment in every course: "I pledge on my honor that I have not given or received any unauthorized assistance on this examination (or assignment)." Consequently, you will be requested to include this pledge on each exam and project. Please also carefully read the Office of Information Technology’s policy regarding acceptable use of computer accounts.

Programming projects are to be written individually, therefore cooperation or use of unauthorized materials on projects is a violation of the University’s Code of Academic Integrity. Both the person receiving assistance and the person providing assistance are in violation of the honor code. Any evidence of this, or of unacceptable use of computer accounts, use of unauthorized materials or cooperation on exams or quizzes, or other possible violations of the Honor Code, will be submitted to the Student Honor Council, which could result in an XF for the course, suspension, or expulsion.

• For learning the course concepts (including the programming languages), students are welcome to study together or to receive help from anyone else. You may discuss with others the project requirements, the features of the programming languages used, what was discussed in class and in the class web forum, and general syntax errors.

• When it comes to actually writing a project assignment, other than help from the instructional staff a project must solely and entirely be your own work. Working with another student or individual, or using anyone else’s work in any way except as noted in this paragraph, is a violation of the code of academic integrity and will be reported to the Honor Council. You may not discuss design of any part of a project with anyone except the instructor or teaching assistants. Examples of questions you may not ask others might be "How did you implement this part of the project?" or "Please look at my code and help me find my stupid syntax error!". You may not use any disallowed source of information in creating either your project design or code. When writing projects you are free to use ideas or short fragments of code from published textbooks or publicly available information, but the specific source must be cited in a comment in the relevant section of the program.

Violations of the Code of Academic Integrity may include, but are not limited to:

1. Failing to do all or any of the work on a project by yourself, other than assistance from the instructional staff.

2. Using any ideas or any part of another person’s project, or copying any other individual’s work in any way.

3. Giving any parts or ideas from your project, including test data, to another student.

4. Allowing any other students access to your program on any computer system.

5. Posting solutions to your projects to publicly-accessible sites, e.g., on GitHub. (Note that if you want to use Git for your own work, GitHub and GitLab both offer free private repositories; make sure yours is private.)

6. Transferring any part of a project to or from another student or individual by any means, electronic or otherwise.

If you have any question about a particular situation or source then consult with the instructors in advance. Should you have difficulty with a programming assignment you should see the instructional staff in office hours, and not solicit help from anyone else in violation of these rules.

It is the responsibility, under the honor policy, of anyone who suspects an incident of academic dishonesty has occurred to report it to their instructor, or directly to the Honor Council.

Every semester the department has discovered a number of students attempting to cheat on project assignments, in violation of academic integrity requirements. Students’ academic careers have been significantly affected by a decision to cheat. Think about whether you want to join them before contemplating cheating, or before helping a friend to cheat.

You are welcome and encouraged to compare and discuss your implementations of the programming projects with other students after those projects are graded, provided that all of the students in question have received nonzero scores for that project assignment, and that the project will not be built upon in a later project assignment.

14 Additional Policies🔗

Besides the policies in this syllabus, the University’s policies apply during the semester. Various policies that may be relevant appear in the Undergraduate Catalog.

If you experience difficulty during the semester keeping up with the academic demands of your courses, you may consider contacting the Learning Assistance Service in 2201 Shoemaker Building at (301) 314-7693. Their educational counselors can help with time management issues, reading, note-taking, and exam preparation skills.

15 Accessibility and Disability Services🔗

The University of Maryland is committed to creating and maintaining a welcoming and inclusive educational, working, and living environment for people of all abilities. The University of Maryland is also committed to the principle that no qualified individual with a disability shall, on the basis of disability, be excluded from participation in or be denied the benefits of the services, programs, or activities of the University, or be subjected to discrimination. The Accessibility & Disability Service (ADS) provides reasonable accommodations to qualified individuals to provide equal access to services, programs and activities. ADS cannot assist retroactively, so it is generally best to request accommodations several weeks before the semester begins or as soon as a disability becomes known.

For assistance in obtaining an accommodation, contact Accessibility and Disability Service at 301-314-7682, or email them at adsfrontdesk@umd.edu.

16 Basic Needs Security🔗

If you have difficulty affording groceries or accessing sufficient food to eat every day, or lack a safe and stable place to live, please visit UMD’s Division of Student Affairs website for information about resources the campus offers you and let me know if I can help in any way.

17 Veteran Resources🔗

UMD provides some additional support to our student veterans. You can access those resources at the office of Veteran Student Life and the Counseling Center. Veterans and active duty military personnel with special circumstances (e.g., upcoming deployments, drill requirements, disabilities) are welcome and encouraged to communicate these, in advance if possible, to the instructor.

18 Emergency Preparedness🔗

Emergencies on campus can happen at any time. To prepare, visit prepare.umd.edu or use the emergency symbol in the UMD App to review information. Resources for persons with disabilities are available on the emergency preparedness page of the ADA Coordinator’s website.

19 Notice of Mandatory Reporting🔗

Notice of mandatory reporting of sexual assault, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, and stalking: As a faculty member, I am designated as a "Responsible University Employee," and I must report all disclosures of sexual assault, sexual harassment, interpersonal violence, and stalking to UMD’s Title IX Coordinator per University Policy on Sexual Harassment and Other Sexual Misconduct.

If you wish to speak with someone confidentially, please contact one of UMD’s confidential resources, such as CARE to Stop Violence (located on the Ground Floor of the Health Center) at 301-741-3442 or the Counseling Center (located at the Shoemaker Building) at 301-314-7651.

You may also seek assistance or supportive measures from UMD’s Title IX Coordinator, Angela Nastase, by calling 301-405-1142, or emailing titleIXcoordinator@umd.edu. To view further information on the above, please visit the Office of Civil Rights and Sexual Misconduct’s website at ocrsm.umd.edu.

20 Course Evaluations🔗

If you have a suggestion for improving this class, don’t hesitate to tell the instructor or TAs during the semester. At the end of the semester, please don’t forget to provide your feedback using the campus-wide CourseEvalUM system. Your comments will help make this class better. CourseEvalUM is scheduled to be open sometime in December, but this is subject to change by campus.

21 Right to Change Information🔗

Although every effort has been made to be complete and accurate, unforeseen circumstances arising during the semester could require the adjustment of any material given here. Consequently, given due notice to students, the instructors reserve the right to change any information on this syllabus or in other course materials.

22 Copyright🔗

All course materials are copyright Dept. of Computer Science, University of Maryland (Marvin Zelkowitz, Jeff Foster, Larry Herman, Atif Memon, Chau-Wen Tseng, Michael Hicks, David Levin, Nelson Padua-Perez, Anwar Mamat, Cliff Bakalian). All rights reserved. Students are permitted to use course materials for their own personal use only. Course materials may not be distributed publicly or provided to others (excepting other students in the course), in any way or format.

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