CSC 316 Functional Programming Resit 2023

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CSC 316: Resit Examination for CSC316, Functional Programming, from the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science, University of Buea, July 2023. Students answer Question ONE and any TWO others. Question 1 covers why functional programming suits concurrent and high-abstraction problems, and defining OCaml types and a counting function for a civil-status registry of persons. Question 2 covers the three rules of the lambda calculus (alpha-conversion, beta-reduction, eta-conversion), simplifying a lambda expression by alternating left-most-innermost and right-most-outermost reduction and by call-by-value, and constructing least fixpoints for recursive functions via a functional's repeated composition, applied to a sample function. Question 3 covers type safety, type checking and type reconstruction, the notion of substitution and its use in term matching, how substitution generalises to most general unifiers, and the definitions of polymorphism and parametric polymorphism. Question 4 covers how axiomatic, denotational and operational semantics attribute meaning to programs, and formalising the operational semantics of a bean-reduction game (BWG) with three adjacency rules, applied to two example bean sequences.