NewBee: Context-Free Grammar (CFG) of a New Programming Language for Novice Programmers

Learning programming and using programming languages are the essential aspects of computer science education.Students use programming languages to write their programs.These computer programs(students or practitioners written)make computers artificially intelligent and perform the tasks needed by the users.Without these programs,the computer may be visioned as a pointless machine.As the premise of writing programs is situated with specific programming languages,enormous efforts have been made to develop and create programming languages.However,each program-ming language is domain-specific and has its nuances,syntax and seman-tics,with specific pros and cons.These language-specific details,including syntax and semantics,are significant hurdles for novice programmers.Also,the instructors of introductory programming courses find these language specificities as the biggest hurdle in students learning,where more focus is on syntax than logic development and actual implementation of the program.Considering the conceptual difficulty of programming languages and novice students’struggles with the language syntax,this paper describes the design and development of a Context-Free Grammar(CFG)of a programming language for the novice,newcomers and students who do not have computer science as their major.Due to its syntax proximity to daily conversations,this paper hypothesizes that this language will be easy to use and understand by novice programmers.This paper systematically designed the language by identifying themes from various existing programming languages(e.g.,C,Python).Additionally,this paper surveyed computer science experts from industry and academia,where experts self-reported their satisfaction with the newly designed language.The results indicate that 93%of the experts reported satisfaction with the NewBee for novice,newcomer and non-Computer Sci-ence(CS)major students.

Analysis of an event study using the Fama–French five‑factor model:teaching approaches including spreadsheets and the R programming language

The current financial education framework has an increasing need to introduce tools that facilitate the application of theoretical models to real-world data and contexts.However,only a limited number of free tools are available for this purpose.Given this lack of tools,the present study provides two approaches to facilitate the implementa-tion of an event study.The first approach consists of a set of MS Excel files based on the Fama–French five-factor model,which allows the application of the event study methodology in a semi-automatic manner.The second approach is an open-source R-programmed tool through which results can be obtained in the context of an event study without the need for programming knowledge.This tool widens the calculus possibilities provided by the first approach and offers the option to apply not only the Fama–French five-factor model but also other models that are common in the finan-cial literature.It is a user-friendly tool that enables reproducibility of the analysis and ensures that the calculations are free of manipulation errors.Both approaches are freely available and ready-to-use.

An Exploratory Practice of Integration of Industry and Education in High-level Programming Language Course in the Background of New Engineering

This paper analyzes some problems of the current teaching situation in the course High-level Programming Language,such as the lagging content of the course compared with technology development,the emphasis on theory rather than on practice,the low enthusiasm of students for learning,and the weak practical ability of students.In response to the needs of enterprises for talents under the background of New Engineering,especially the cultivation of students’adaptability and practical abilities towards future industries to improve students’knowledge and problemsolving abilities to keep up with the modern technology,this paper proposes the ways and methods to reform and explore the teaching content and teaching methods by integrating industry and education,assisting teaching according to industrial demands,and lowering technology barriers of new technology.The practical effect is evaluated through a survey in class and the follow-up questionnaire after class,and the results show that the effect of the practice is effective.

《Grammars for Programming Languages》简介

加利福尼亚大学J. Craig cleaveland和Robert C. Uzgalis合著的“Grammars forProgramming Languages”(程序设计语言的文法)一书系美国ELSEVIER NORTH-HO-LLAND, INC.1977年出版的一套程序设计语言丛书之一。 自从1956年Noam

Linguistic Economy Applied to Programming Language Identifiers

Though many different readability metrics have been created, there still is no universal agreement defining readability of software source code. The lack of a clear agreement of source code readability has ramifications in many areas of the software development life-cycle, not least of which being software maintainability. We propose a measurement based on Linguistic Economy to bridge the gap between mathematical and behavioral aspects. Linguistic Economy describes efficiencies of speech and is generally applied to natural languages. In our study, we create a large corpus of words that are likely to be found in a programmer’s vocabulary, and a corpus of existing identifiers found in a collection of open-source projects. We perform a usage analysis to create a database from both of these corpora. Linguistic Economy suggests that words requiring less effort to speak are used more often than words requiring more effort. This concept is applied to measure how difficult program identifiers are to understand by extracting them from the program source and comparing their usage to the database. Through this process, we can identify source code that programmers find difficult to review. We validate our work using data from a survey where programmers identified unpleasant to review source files. The results indicate that source files identified as unpleasant to review source code have more linguistically complicated identifiers than pleasant programs.

Current Trends in Online Programming Languages Learning Tools: A Systematic Literature Review

Students face difficulties in programming languages learning (PLL) which encourages many scholars to investigate the factors behind that. Although there a number of positive and negative factors found to be effective in PLL procedure, utilising online tools in PLL were recognized as a positive recommended means. This motivates many researchers to provide solutions and proposals which result in a number of choices and options. However, categorising those efforts and showing what has been done, would provide a better and clear image for future studies. Therefore, this paper aims to conduct a systematic literature review to show what studies have been done and then categorise them based on the type of online tools and the aims of the research. The study follows Kitchenham and Charters guidelines for writing SLR (Systematic Literature Review). The search result reached 1390 publications between 2013-09/2018. After the filtration which has been done through selected criteria, 160 publications were found to be adequate to answer the review questions. The main results of this systematic review are categorizing the aims of the studies in online PLL tools, classifying the tools and finding the current trends of the online PLL tools.

An Improved Bottom-up Method for Implementing Equational Programming Language

Equational programming language (EP) is a novl intelligence language. This paper describes our EP system based on equational logic. Its execution mechanism is pattern matching. The paper focuses the discussion on the improvment to bottom-up tree pattern matching. The new bottom-up method shows high execution efficiency.

GPU parallel computing： Programming language,debugging tools and data structures

With many cores driven by high memory bandwidth, today＇s graphics processing unit （GPU） has involved into an absolute computing workhorse. More and more scientists, researchers and software developers are using GPUs to accelerate their algorithms and ap- plications. Developing complex programs and software on the GPU, however, is still far from easy with ex- isting tools provided by hardware vendors. This article introduces our recent research efforts to make GPU soft- ware development much easier. Specifically, we designed BSGP, a high-level programming language for general- purpose computation on the GPU. A BSGP program looks much the same as a sequential C program, and is thus easy to read, write and maintain. Its performance on the GPU is guaranteed by a well-designed compiler that converts the program to native GPU code. We also developed an effective debugging system for BSGP pro- grams based on the GPU interrupt, a unique feature of BSGP that allows calling CPU functions from inside GPU code. Moreover, using BSGP, we developed GPU algorithms for constructing several widely-used spatial hierarchies for high-performance graphics applications.

Extraction of Robot Primitive Control Rules from Natural Language Instructions

A support vector rule based method is investigated for the construction of motion controllers via natural language training. It is a two-phase process including motion control information collection from natural language instructions, and motion information condensation with the aid of support vector machine （SVM） theory. Self-organizing fuzzy neural networks are utilized for the collection of control rules, from which support vector rules are extracted to form a final controller to achieve any given control accuracy. In this way, the number of control rules is reduced, and the structure of the controller tidied, making a controller constructed using natural language training more appropriate in practice, and providing a fundamental rule base for high-level robot behavior control. Simulations and experiments on a wheeled robot are carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.

Local Radial Basis Function Methods: Comparison, Improvements, and Implementation

Radial Basis Function methods for scattered data interpolation and for the numerical solution of PDEs were originally implemented in a global manner. Subsequently, it was realized that the methods could be implemented more efficiently in a local manner and that the local approaches could match or even surpass the accuracy of the global implementations. In this work, three localization approaches are compared: a local RBF method, a partition of unity method, and a recently introduced modified partition of unity method. A simple shape parameter selection method is introduced and the application of artificial viscosity to stabilize each of the local methods when approximating time-dependent PDEs is reviewed. Additionally, a new type of quasi-random center is introduced which may be better choices than other quasi-random points that are commonly used with RBF methods. All the results within the manuscript are reproducible as they are included as examples in the freely available Python Radial Basis Function Toolbox.

Use of content management systems to address nursing workflow

Nurses are at the forefront of providing healthcare services to individuals of all age groups and with varying medical conditions.Aside from the critical knowledge and technical skills from nursing science,advancement in technology has assisted nurses in delivering quality nursing care by streamlining workflow processes and ensuring that data can easily be retrieved or modified.Electronic health records dramatically changed the landscape of the healthcare practice by providing an electronic means to store data and for healthcare professionals to retrieve and manipulate health information in a secured and collaborative environment.But with the nature of data being stored in the electronic health records,nurses still need to organize and process these data into relevant information,knowledge or wisdom so they can provide better holistic care to patients.This discussion paper details the role of content management systems in addressing nursing workflow by providing a mechanism for nurses to be developers themselves,and not just users or consumers of health innovative technologies.By using content management systems as platform for application development,nurses or other healthcare professionals,may be able to address problems with internal workflow without having to incur huge amounts in software development,or having to extensively learn programming languages.

Decision Making as Theorem Proving

We present a method for using type theory to solve decision making problem. Our method is based on the view that decision making is a special kind of theorem proving activity. An isomorphism between problems and types, and solutions and programs has been established to support this view which is much similar to the Curry-Howard isomorphism between propositions and types, and proofs and programs. To support our method, a proof development system called PowerEpsilon has been developed, and the synthesis of a decision procedure for validity of first-order propositional logic is discussed to show the power of the system.

Constructing a Simple Verbal Compiler

The paper’s purpose is to design and program the four operation-calculators that receives voice instructions and runs them as either a voice or text phase. The Calculator simulates the work of the Compiler. The paper is a practical example programmed to support that it is possible to construct a verbal Compiler.

Function Definition Language FDL andIts Implementation

A Function Definition Language (FDL) is presented. Though de-signed for describing specifications, FDL is also a general-purpose functional pro-gramming language. It uses context-free language as data type, supports patternmatching definition of functions, offers several function definition forms, and is exe-cutable. It is shown that FDL has strong expressiveness, is easy to use and describesalgorithms concisely and naturally. An interpreter of FDL is introduced. Experi-ments and discussion are included.

A Survey of Language-Based Approaches to Cyber-Physical and Embedded System Development

As computers continue to advance, they are becoming more capable of sensing, interacting, and communicating with the physical and cyber world. Medical devices, electronic braking systems in automotive applications, and industrial control systems are examples of the many Cyber-Physical Systems （CPS） that utilize these computing capabilities. Given the potential consequences of software related failures in such systems, a high degree of safety, security, and reliability is often required. Programming languages are important tools used by programmers to develop CPS. They provide a programmer with the ability to transform designs into machine code. Of equal importance is their ability to detect and avoid programming mistakes. The development of CPS has predominantly been accomplished using the C programming language. Although C is a powerful language, it lacks features present in other languages that facilitate the development of reliable systems. This has prompted research into language-based alternatives for improving program quality through the use of programming languages. This paper presents an overview of the characteristics of embedded and cyber-physical systems and the associated requirements imposed on programming languages. This is followed by a survey of relevant research into language- based methods for creating safe, reliable, and robust software for CPS.

CSchema： A Downgrading Policy Language for XML Access Control

The problem of regulating access to XML documents has attracted much attention from both academic and industry communities. In existing approaches, the XML elements specified by access policies axe either accessible or inaccessible according to their sensitivity. However, in some cases, the original XML elements are sensitive and inaccessible, but after being processed in some appropriate ways, the results become insensitive and thus accessible. This paper proposes a policy language to accommodate such cases, which can express the downgrading operations on sensitive data in XML documents through explicit calculations on them. The proposed policy language is called calculation-embedded schema （CSchema）, which extends the ordinary schema languages with protection type for protecting sensitive data and specifying downgrading operations. CSchema language has a type system to guarantee the type correctness of the embedded calculation expressions and moreover this type system also generates a security view after type checking a CSchema policy. Access policies specified by CSchema are enforced by a validation procedure, which produces the released documents containing only the accessible data by validating the protected documents against CSchema policies. These released documents are then ready to be accessed by, for instance, XML query engines. By incorporating this validation procedure, other XML processing technologies can use CSchema as the access control module.

Defining Dynamic Graphics by a Graphical Language

A graphical language which can be used for defining dynamic picture and applying control ac- tions to it is defined with an expanded attributed grammar.Based on this,a system is built for de- veloping the presentation of application data of user interface.This system provides user interface de- signers with a friendly and high efficient programming environment.

Abstract Implementation of Algebraic Specifications in a Temporal Logic Language

A formal technique for incorporating two specification paradigms is presented,in which an algebraic specifi- cation is implemented by a set of abstract procedures specified in pre- and post-condition style.The link be- tween the two level specifications is provided via a translation from terms of algebraic specifications into tempo- ral logic formulae representing abstract programs.In terms of translation,a criterion for an abstract implementation satisfying its specification is given,which allows one to check the consistency between the two levels of specifications.The abstract implementations can be refined into executable code by refining each abstract procedure in it.It is proved that the satisfication relation between a specification and its implementations is preserved by such refinement steps.

A Comparison of Elementary Foreign Language Programs in China and the USA

This study presents comparisons regarding current elementary foreign language programs in China and the USA.The design features a comparative analysis approach combined with deductive thematic analysis to collect,analyze,and compare relevant data.Data were collected from samples such as governmental documents,organizational guidelines,national statistical reports,published scholarly works,audiovisual materials,and textbooks.Preceding the research,primary categories were identified,used to group data,and then look for similarities and differences.Categories for comparison were:(a)program types,(b)curriculum standards,(c)instructional methods,and(d)assessments.Results indicated US programs could benefit from consistency,widespread support and demand,state-to-state organization and/or alignment,equitable teaching materials,and attention to all student populations.China's program,while organized,could benefit from more authentic,real-life-context,other-culture-oriented practices,flexibility,and deeper,genuine information about English-speaking countries’cultures.This research contributes to scholarly conversations regarding comparisons of elementary foreign language teaching in China and the USA,while also supporting worldwide comparisons and exchange of ideas.