When

Last 10 minutes of class on Wednesday, February 4, 2026.

Everyone takes the exam at the same time.

Scope

Language Theory.

Ground Rules

You will take the exam on Brightspace. There is 10 minute time limit, or 15 minutes for those with time-and-a-half accommodations.

Preparation Checklist

Do each of the following to maximize your preparation:

• Review the recordings for class periods you missed, and for portions of the class sessions that you attended but feel you need to review.
• Work through the course notes on Language Theory.
• Watch the embedded videos in the course notes above.
• Follow some of the links within the course notes to outside articles and videos. This gives you access to new material as well as additional takes on the course content.
• Practice with the recall questions on the notes above.
• Read Section 2.1 of [Sipser] (Not important but possibly useful).
• Do a few (or as many as time allows) of the course practice problems in the sections on Formal Languages and Generative Grammars.

The following readings are optional in the sense that no direct assessment will be based on them. However, as this course marks your deepest dive yet into computing theory and history, you’d be wise to familiarize yourself with the following:

• Alan Turing's Forgotten Ideas
• Ada and the First Computer
• Decoding an Ancient Computer
• The Origins of Computing

Were you able to check off every box?

Outline of Course Content

The fact that active recall is better for acquiring long-term knowledge does not mean that outlines and concept maps are not useful. Learners should use multiple techniques—think “both and” rather than “either or.”

Language Theory
    Concerned with how computations are expressed
    Why study?
    Information Representation
    Symbols
    Alphabets
    Strings
    Languages
    Operations on Languages
        Union, Intersections, Concatenation, Kleene Star
    How languages can be defined
        Generative grammars
            Notation
            The role of variables
            Examples
            Predefined Variables
            A grammar for simple arithmetic expressions
            Derivation Trees
            Ambiguity
            Formal Definition of a Generative Grammar
            Not every language can be generated by a grammar
            Restrictions
                Why Chomsky wanted to restrict grammars
                Chomsky's Originals
                    Type-0: unrestricted
                    Type-1: Context-Sensitive
                    Type-2: Context-Free
                        LHS is only one variable
                    Type-3: Regular
                Others
                    Noncontracting
                         Never shrinks
                    Essentially Noncontracting
                         Noncontracting except for S → ε
                    Linear
                    Right-Linear and Left-Linear
            Chomsky Hierarchy
        Analytic Grammars
            Notation
            Differences from Generative Grammars
        Semantics
        Programming Language Theory
            Syntax
            Semantics
            Type Theory
            Static Analysis
            Translation
            Runtime Systems
            Verification
            Metaprogramming
            Classification

About the Problems

This is a mini-quiz which tests for immediate understanding of topics and not your ability to work out problems over an extended duration of time. There is a strict time limit so that your immediate fluency is tested rather than your ability to search the web (or worse, ask a chatbot), since these things take time. There will be 5–10 questions, some will be multiple choice, some multi-select, and some matching. There are no free-form answers, so the exam will be autograded and you will see your score immediately after it is submitted.

All content on the assigned readings is fair game for questions, so do not neglect the readings, and by all means do the recall questions!