COP4020 Programming Languages

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COP4020Programming Languages

• Expression and assignment
• Prof. Xin Yuan

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Overview

• Expression and assignment statement

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Expression Syntax

• An expression consists of
• An atomic object, e.g. number or variable
• An operator applied to a collection of operands
  (or arguments) that are expressions
•  Common syntactic forms for operators
• Function call notation, e.g. somefunc(A, B, C)
• Infix notation for binary operators, e.g. A B
• Prefix notation for unary operators, e.g. -A
• Postfix notation for unary operators, e.g. i
• Cambridge Polish notation (Lisp)
• Prefix notation, function inside parentheses (
  ( 1 3) 2)
• "Multi-word" infix, e.g. agtb?ab in C

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Operator Precedence and Associativity

• The use of infix notation sometimes leads to
  ambiguity as to what is an operand of what
• Fortran example abcde/f
• ((((ab)c)d)e)/f
• a(((bc)d)(e/f))
• a((b(c(de)))/f)
• A programming language must be able to
  disambiguate such expressions
• Add parentheses
• Define operator precedence and associativity in
  the language that specify the order of evaluation
  in the absence of parentheses.

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Operator Precedence and Associativity

• Operator precedence higher operator precedence
  means that a collection of operators group more
  tightly in an expression than operators of lower
  precedence
• Operator associativity determines grouping of
  operators of the same precedence
• Left associative operators are grouped
  left-to-right (most common)
• Right associative operators are grouped
  right-to-left (Fortran power operator , C
  assignment operator and unary minus)
• Non-associative requires parenthesis when
  composed (Ada power operator )
• In Fortran gt , / gt , - and , -, , /
  are left associated and is right associated
• Abcde/f ?

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Operator Precedence and Associativity

• In a language, the number of operators can be
  quite large.
• E.g. C/C
• The designer of a language must be careful about
  the precedence and associativity.
• In C/C
• If (A lt B C lt D) If ((A lt B) (C lt
  D))
• In Pascal if AltB and CltD thenis grouped as
  follows if Alt(B and C)ltD then

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Evaluation Order of Expressions

• Precedence and associativity state the rules for
  grouping operators in expressions, but do not
  determine the operand evaluation order!
• Expression a-f(b)-bcis structured
  as (a-f(b))-(bc)but either (a-f(b)) or (bc)
  can be evaluated first
• The evaluation order of arguments in function and
  subroutine calls may differ, e.g. arguments
  evaluated from left to right or right to left
• Knowing the operand evaluation order is important
• Side effects suppose f(b) above modifies the
  value of b (f(b) has a side effect) then the
  value will depend on the operand evaluation order
• Code improvement compilers rearrange expressions
  to maximize efficiency, e.g. a compiler can
  improve memory load efficiency by moving loads up
  in the instruction stream

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Expression Operand Reordering Issues

• Rearranging expressions may lead to arithmetic
  overflow or different floating point results
• Assume b, d, and c are very large positive
  integers, then if b-cd is rearranged into
  (bd)-c arithmetic overflow occurs 
• Floating point value of b-cd may differ from
  bd-c
• Most programming languages will not rearrange
  expressions when parenthesis are used, e.g. write
  (b-c)d to avoid problems
• Design choices
• Java expressions evaluation is always left to
  right in the order operands are provided in the
  source text and overflow is always detected
• Pascal expression evaluation is unspecified and
  overflows are always detected
• C anc C expression evaluation is unspecified
  and overflow detection is implementation dependent

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Boolean expression and short-Circuit Evaluation

• Boolean expressions is not quite the same as the
  regular arithmetic expressions.
• To evaluate an arithmetic expression, all
  components must be evaluated
• To evaluate (ab) (cd) compute ab, compute
  cd, compute (ab) (cd)
• T1 ab
• T2 cd
• T3 T1-T2
• To evaluate an boolean expression, we may or may
  not evaluate all components. Consider (alt b)
  (cltd)
• Option 1 (do it like regular arithmetic
  expression)
• T1 altb
• T2 cltd
• T3 T1 T2

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Boolean expression and short-Circuit Evaluation

• To evaluate an boolean expression, we may or may
  not evaluate all components. Consider (alt b)
  (cltd)
• Option 2 do it without evaluate the whole thing
• T1 alt b
• If (T1 false) goto 100
• T2 cltd
• T3 T1 T2
• goto 200
• 100 T3 false
• 200
• Compute boolean value for altb, if false, done
  (the whole expression is false). Otherwise,
  compute boolean value for cltd, etc.
• Computing the boolean value of an expression
  without evaluating the whole expression (option
  2) is called short circuit evaluation.
• Do we assume short circuit evaluation in C/C
  coding?

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Short circuit evaluation examples

• for (i0 (iltN) (ai ! val) i)
• while ((p! NULL) (p-gtvalue ! val))
  pp-gtnext

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Short-Circuit Evaluation

• Short-circuit evaluation of Boolean expressions
  the result of an operator can be determined from
  the evaluation of just one operand
• C, C, and Java use (require) short-circuit
  conditional and/or operators
• If a in ab evaluates to false, b is not
  evaluated (a b is false)
• If a in ab evaluates to true, b is not
  evaluated (a b is true).

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Assignments and Expressions

• The use of expression and assignments is the
  fundamental difference between imperative and
  functional languages
• Imperative "computing by means of side effects
• Computation is an ordered series of changes to
  values of variables in memory (state) and
  statement ordering is influenced by run-time
  testing values of variables
• Pure functional languages computation consists
  of entirely of expression evaluation.
• A function is idempotent in a functional
  language it always returns the same value given
  the same arguments because of the absence of
  side-effects (no memory state is changed
  implicitly in such a function).

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L-Values vs. R-Values

• Consider the assignment of the form a bc
• The left-hand side a of the assignment is an
  l-value which is an expression that should denote
  a location, e.g. array element a2 or a variable
  foo or a dereferenced pointer p
• A variable in the right-hand side (bc) of the
  assignment is an r-value that denotes the value. 

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Value Model vs. Reference Model

• Two general ways to implement an assignment
• Languages that adopt the value model of variables
  copy the value of bc into the location of a
  (e.g. Ada, Pascal, C)
• Languages that adopt the reference model of
  variables copy references, resulting in shared
  data values via multiple references
• Clu copies the reference of bc into a so that a
  and bc refer to the same object
• Java is a mix it uses the value model for
  built-in types and the reference model for class
  instances
• Example

Value model
Reference model
4
A
4
A
B 2 C B A BC
2
B
B
2
C
2
C