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Course Info

Check here for lecture and dicussion section, time, place, and instructor.

CS 3110 (formerly CS 312) is the third programming course in the Computer Science curriculum, following CS 1110/1112 and CS 2110. The goal of the course is to help students become excellent programmers and software designers who can design and implement software that is elegant, efficient, and correct, and whose code can be maintained and reused.

CS 3110 covers a broad range of topics, including:

  • Alternative programming paradigms, especially functional and concurrent programming
  • Writing and using specifications
  • Modular programming and data abstraction
  • Reasoning about program correctness
  • Reasoning about system performance
  • Useful and efficient data structures

Here is a diagram showing the course material and the dependencies among different parts of the course.

Functional Programming in Objective Caml (OCaml)

We use a programming language from the ML family of programming languages throughout the course: Objective Caml (OCaml). OCaml is a modern functional programming language with advanced type and module systems. However, the course is not about the OCaml language; rather, OCaml provides a convenient framework in which we can achieve the objectives of the course. Like the object-oriented model of Java, the functional paradigm of OCaml is an important programming model with which all students should be familiar, as it underlies the core of almost any high-level programming language. In addition, the OCaml type and module systems provide frameworks for ensuring code is modular, correct, re-usable, and elegant. In fact, OCaml does support objects, but we will focus more on other aspects of the language. By studying alternatives to object-oriented programming, students will be better equipped to use, implement or even design future programming environments that combine the best features of both worlds.

Another important reason we use OCaml is that it has a relatively clean and simple evaluation model that makes it easier to reason about the correctness of programs. In our studies, we will reason not only about the functional correctness of code, but also the space, time, and other resources used in a computation.

Staff

NAME POSITION EMAIL/PHONE OFFICE HOURS
Robert L. Constable Instructor rc@cs.cornell.edu 320 TBA
Remy Jette TA / Course Administrator rcj57@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Adi Bodas TA asb326@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Alice Meng TA aym27@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Daniel Sainati TA dhs253@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Eric Wu TA ew373@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Guandao Yang TA gy46@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Giang Nguyen TA htn26@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Jonathan Chan TA jyc57@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Megan Teeking TA mat333@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Michael Stella TA ms2639@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Oscar Zegarra TA oaz2@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Ralph Recto TA rjr288@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Richard Wu TA rw398@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Seung Hee Han TA sh969@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Sushmitha Krishnamoorthy TA sk2273@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Shiyu Wang TA sw673@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Alvin Zhu TA yz542@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Amber Hillhouse Consultant adh94@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Advitya Khanna Consultant ak634@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Alexander Xu Consultant ax35@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Daniel Hanggi Consultant djh325@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Eric Lin Consultant esl89@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Joshua Chen Consultant jdc345@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Jacob Padilla Consultant jsp264@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Lisa Zhu Consultant jz352@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Kevin Emmanual Hernandez Consultant keh222@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Laura Ng Consultant ln233@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Michael Mauer Consultant mrm355@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Manvith Narahari Consultant mrn58@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Niranjan Ravi Consultant nr339@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Patrick Nicholson Consultant pkn7@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Richa Deshpande Consultant rd382@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Soloman Maina Consultant sam524@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Tyler Etzel Consultant tje44@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Taylor Schoettle Consultant tjs323@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below
Victor Reis Consultant vor3@cornell.edu Surge 107/108 See Below

Staff Responsibilities

The teaching assistants (TAs) teach recitation sections and assist with homework and exams. All TAs hold regular office hours, and we encourage you to attend them if you have difficulties. The consultants are undergraduates who have excelled in their coursework and are employed as graders and tutors. They also hold regular office hours. The course administrator provides clerical and logistical support for the course. Please notify the course administrator of any errors or discrepancies in the website.

Consulting runs only when Cornell is in session. Consulting hours end at 6pm on a day following an assignment due date and 7pm on a prelim day. There are no consulting hours during official breaks. Consulting ends on the last shift on the last week of classes.

Course Administration

Website

The course website is http://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs3110/. Announcements will be posted on the home page. Check periodically for new announcements.

Discussion Forum

We will be using Piazza for class discussion. Piazza is a web-based discussion forum for communication with classmates and the course staff. If you were preregistered, you should already have received a signup message from Piazza. If not, go here to get signed up.

The staff continuously monitor the forum and will respond to questions in a timely manner. This is the most efficient method of getting help and has the added advantage that others can benefit from your question. There is a link to our Piazza class page in the navigation bar above.

If you know the answer to a question, feel free to post a reply yourself, but please avoid giving away any hints on the homework or posting any part of a solution. This will be considered a violation of Academic Integrity. Generally, rough algorithms or non-solution-specific code fragments are ok if you need them to illustrate a point.

Refrain from emailing the course staff directly. For confidential matters, post a private question to Piazza. This is the most effective way for the course staff to manage such a large course.

If you have any problems or feedback for the Piazza developers, email team@piazza.com.

CMS

We are using the course management system CMS. Everyone who preregistered for the course is entered, but if you did not preregister, you are probably missing. Please login to http://cms.csuglab.cornell.edu/ and check whether you exist. There will be a list of courses you are registered for, and CS 3110 should be one of them. If not, please send your full name and Cornell netID to the Course Administrator so that you can be registered.

You can check your grades and submit homework in CMS. There is a help page with instructions.

Sources

Text

There is no official textbook for the course. However, here are some useful resources:

The last link contains many other resources on the Web for OCaml, including other tutorials, free compilers, libraries, etc.

Handouts

All handouts will be available either on the course web site or in CMS in pdf, html, or plain text format. Check often for new postings.

For viewing pdf files, we recommend Adobe Reader, available free of charge from Adobe.
Get Adobe Reader

Lectures and Sections

In the table below, LEC=lecture, HOL=Hollister, THR=Thurston, PHL=Phillips, UPS = Upson, T=Tuesday, R=Thursday.

Time and Place

SECTION DAY & TIME ROOM INSTRUCTOR
LEC 001 TR 10:10AM - 11:00AM Olin 155 Constable
201 MW 10:10-11:00AM PHL 213 Sushmitha Krishnamoorthy
201 MW 10:10-11:00AM PHL 213 Alvin Zhu
202 MW 2:30-3:20PM HOL 320 Alice Meng
202 MW 2:30-3:20PM HOL 320 Michael Stella
203 MW 2:30-3:20PM UPS 111 Seung Hee Han
203 MW 2:30-3:20PM UPS 111 Ralph Recto
204 TR 3:35-4:25PM HOL 306 Richard Wu
204 TR 3:35-4:25PM HOL 306 Oscar Zegarra
205 MW 3:35-4:25PM HOL 320 Adi Bodas
205 MW 3:35-4:25PM HOL 320 Giang Nguyen
206 MW 7:30-8:20PM HOL 320 Guandao Yang
206 MW 7:30-8:20PM HOL 320 Shiyu Wang
207 TR 1:25-2:15PM HOL 320 Daniel Sainati
207 TR 1:25-2:15PM HOL 320 Megan Teeking
208 TR 3:35-4:25PM THR 203 Jonathan Chan
208 TR 3:35-4:25PM THR 203 Eric Wu

Attendance

Attendance at lecture and section is mandatory. Section will cover new material not covered in lecture and provide an opportunity for questions on recent material, assignments, and exams. You must register for a section, but you may attend any section. However, we prefer that you select one and stay with it.

Occasionally section instructors temporarily move their section to a computer lab. Pay attention to announcements to keep track of any room changes.

Notes

Lecture and section notes will be available on the lecture notes page.

Programming Assignments

There will be six problem sets. Each problem set will involve a programming assignment and may include written exercises and optional karma problems. Posted due dates are subject to change. Assignments are due at 11:59pm on the due date.

You should try to get started on assignments early. The best use of your time and the machine's time is to think about the problems before typing anything at the computer.

Karma Problems

Assignments may include optional problems called karma problems. These problems exist to provide an extra challenge for those who are up to it. Karma problems will be graded, but will not affect your score—they mostly just give good karma. Students who do karma problems will be noticed, and doing them may be taken into account when assigning the final grade, for example if you are right on the line between a B+ and an A–. However, spending your time on regular problems is almost always a more effective way to improve your overall score. Tackle karma problems only after you are sure you have the rest of the assignment well in hand.

Joint Work

Some assignments will be done individually, others in pairs. We will let you know which in the assignment writeup. For assignments done in pairs, you will submit a single joint assignment with both names on it. You must form a group in CMS to do this.

Under no circumstances may you collaborate on the homework with anyone except your partner or misrepresent the authorship of your submitted work. Please see the section on Academic Integrity below.

Submission

You must submit your work online via CMS. Follow the online instructions for submitting files.

You may upload as many times as you wish, and only the latest version will be graded. Note however that if you upload both before and after the deadline, the one after the deadline will be taken, and you will be subject to a late penalty.

If you are working with a partner, you should coordinate with your partner well in advance of the due date and time. You must register the partnership in CMS for each problem set. One of the partners must invite the other, and the other must accept the invitation. See the CMS online help for details. Only one of the partners need submit the files.

Please be careful to submit the correct versions of your files. We will view the excuse "I accidentally submitted the wrong version" with extreme skepticism (we have heard it countless times).

Please include the names and netIds (not your Cornell student id!) of you and your partner in all submitted files.

Late Policy

Submit your assignments on time. CMS tends to lag right near the deadline because too many students wait until the last minute to submit, so make sure to finalize your submission approximately 15 minutes before the deadline.

Additionally, make certain that your code compiles. We use an automated test harness to thoroughly grade submissions. Code which does not compile cannot go through the harness and will receive an automatic zero. However, to avoid over-penalizing students for small typographical or cross-platform errors, the course staff will notify students if their submission did not compile and grant a 24 hour window to correct the error with a small (2-3 line) fix. If, after applying the fix, your code runs smoothly through the harness, it will receive no point deductions and be graded as if it were submitted correctly and on time.

Late submissions will not be accepted. If you submit after submissions close on CMS, you will receive no credit for the assignment. The size of this course hinders our ability to deal with abberations in the grading schedule. In order to provide timely feedback, the course staff needs to receive submissions when they are due. That said, we understand that the responsiblities of a full courseload may become overbearing. Hence each student will be granted two (2) slip days for assignments. Using a slip day grants one an additional 48 hours to submit the assignment. (On partner assignments, both partners must relinquish a slip day in order to receive an extension). Unfortunately, this policy conflicts with the above no-compile grace period, so slip-day submissions must compile, or else shall receive minimal credit. As always, you may include a README in your submission to convey information to the graders.

Extensions will be granted only in exceptional circumstances, such as documented illness, and are handled exclusively by the professor.

Exams

There will be one midterm exam and a final exam. Exams will cover material presented in class and in recitation. The exam schedule can be found here.

Makeup exams must be scheduled within two weeks of the start of class. Check now to see if you have a conflict with another class and contact the course staff immediately to reschedule.

By University policy, courses are not obligated to provide makeup exams for students taking concurrent courses, and we will not do so in this course. The Courses of Study states: "Students are expected to be present throughout each semester at all meetings of courses for which they are registered."

Practice Exams

Exams from previous semesters will be posted on CMS prior to the exam.

Grading

Grading is normally done the weekend after the due date, and assignments returned the following week in section. Grader's comments will be posted on CMS.

Regrades

For all graded work, you may request a regrade if you feel we have made an error in the grading or simply to request a clarification. There is a deadline for regrade requests, normally one week after grades have been posted.

Regrades for problem sets are done using CMS. Follow the online instructions.

For exams, attach a cover sheet to your exam with a description of the problem and submit it to the Course Administrator in person so that your request can be logged.

Academic Integrity

The utmost level of academic integrity is expected of all students. Please read the following carefully.

Under no circumstances may you hand in work done with or by someone else under your own name or share code with anyone else except your partner. (You would be amazed at how easy it is to tell when code has been shared.) You may discuss general questions regarding the OCaml language or the requirements of the assignment with others, but it must never go down to the level of program design or coding.

All exams are closed book. You may not give nor receive assistance from anyone else during an exam.

You may not give away any hints or post any code that might be part of a solution on Piazza. Rough algorithms or non-solution-specific code fragments are ok if you need them to illustrate a point.

If you are unsure about what is permissible and what is not, please ask.

Plagiarism

Students are being approached by commercial vendors and encouraged to sell course materials, including exams, notes, and papers, which are then posted for resale on internet sites. Students have removed materials, even exams, from course Blackboard sites and sold them to commercial vendors. Some commercial vendors falsely convey that the instructor has approved the sale of course materials. Cornell's Blackboard site contains a new notice: "Course materials posted on Blackboard are intellectual property belonging to the author. Students are not permitted to buy or sell any course materials without the express permission of the instructor. Such unauthorized behavior constitutes academic misconduct."

Any such behavior of buying or selling course materials constitutes academic misconduct. Any suspected materials will be tested for plagiarism and due action will follow.

Special Needs

We provide appropriate academic accommodations for students with special needs and/or disabilities. Requests for academic accommodations are to be made during the first three weeks of the semester and must be accompanied by official documentation. Please register with Student Disability Services in 420 CCC to document your eligibility.

Consulting Hours