CSC 316 Functional Programming CA 2019

About this paper

CSC 316: Continuous Assessment Test I for CSC316, Functional Programming, Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Buea, 3 July 2019. The paper instructs 'Answer ANY TWO Questions'; all three are answered for completeness. Question 1 covers the dimensions used to classify functional programming languages (purity, typing discipline, evaluation order, polymorphism style), evaluation strategies (normal order vs call-by-value), a call-by-value reduction of a lambda expression requiring alpha-renaming to avoid capture, denotational semantics, and how static semantics is captured by a type system. Question 2 covers type safety, type checking and type reconstruction, the distinction between a type system and a type theory, unifiability, two worked unification problems computing most general unifiers, and extending a unification algorithm with a symmetric variable-elimination case. Question 3 covers variable capture, De Bruijn indices, alternative capture-avoidance techniques, evaluating two small let-expressions, and an OCaml record type plus a cipher-checking function with example output.