1 / 7

Teaching LP: A Perspective

Teaching LP: A Perspective. Gopal Gupta Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Dallas. Motivation. LP: an important paradigm LP: the grand unifying theory of CS LP: leads to better understanding of CS Hence, teaching LP of utmost importance

opa
Download Presentation

Teaching LP: A Perspective

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Teaching LP:A Perspective Gopal Gupta Department of Computer Science University of Texas at Dallas

  2. Motivation • LP: an important paradigm • LP: the grand unifying theory of CS • LP: leads to better understanding of CS • Hence, teaching LP of utmost importance • Background: Taught LP courses for 12 years (both graduate/undergraduate) • Involved in a project on teaching programming to 1st year students via Prolog (panels in ICLP’92 &’93).

  3. Pedagogical Objectives • Understand main ideas of LP • Develop an appreciation for the power and uniqueness of LP • How LP relates to various areas of CS (databases, s/w engg., AI, ..) • Develop an appreciation for LP’s relation to Constraint Prog/Op. Res. • Appreciate LP’s role in reducing the complexity of programming

  4. Teaching of LP in US • LP as a paradigm is well recognized in US. • Most US Univ. cover it in a 4th yr Prog. Lang. course (taught as one of the four paradigms but in a very cursory fashion). • Many Universities have a dedicated graduate level course in LP. • At UT Dallas: 120 UG students are exposed to LP every year; about 40 grad students take the dedicated course.

  5. Curriculum at UT Dallas • Course Goal: Get main ideas of LP across: • The basis of LP in theorem proving; computation is deduction • Basic understanding of Prolog’s execution model: unification, search w/ backtracking • Programming with recursion • Relational nature of Prolog programs: invertibility of predicates • Applications; Generalization to Constraints

  6. Ideal Curriculum • As part of a Prog. Lang. class: - Database programming (datalog) - Backtracking search - Recursion/List Proc. • As a complete course on LP - All topics in previous slides

  7. Personal Remarks • Need to motivate people to study LP • Lack of awareness of LP’s power; wrongly perceived as a failed language • However, once such people take an LP class, they appreciate its power • Most students are motivated by “cool” applications; we need to advertise cool applications of LP more. • At UTD, application of LP in solving some local problems is a single contributing factor in attracting students to LP classes in large numbers.

More Related