Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute, 1970. / Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Computer Science, 1984. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 187-194).

Thesis (M.S. in Computer Science)--Naval Postgraduate School, September 2002. / Thesis advisor(s): Mikhail Auguston, Richard Riehle. Includes bibliographical references (p. 89). Also available online.

Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 133-135).

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143).

Thesis--Wisconsin. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 178-184).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 126-132).

This thesis reports on research undertaken in an exploration of the use of formal semantics for student modelling in intelligent tutoring systems. The domain chosen was that of tutoring programming languages and within that domain Prolog was selected to be the target language for this exploration. The problem considered is one of how to analyse students' errors at a level which allows diagnosis to be more flexible and meaningful than is possible with the 'mal-rules' and 'bugcatalogue' approach of existing systems. The ideas put forward by Robin Milner [1980] in his Calculus of Communicating Systems (CCS) form the basis of the formalism which is proposed as a solution to this problem. Based on the findings of an empirical investigation, novices' misconceptions of control flow in Prolog was defined as a suitable area in which to explore the application of this solution. A selection of Prolog programs used in that investigation was formally described in terms of CCS. These formal descriptions were used by a production rule system to generate a number of the incomplete or faulty models of Prolog execution which were identified in the first empirical study. In a second empirical study, a machine-analysis tool, designed to be part of a diagnostic tutoring module, used these models to diagnose students' misconceptions of Prolog control flow. This initial application of CCS to student modelling showed that the models of Prolog execution generated by the system could be used successfully to detect students' misunderstandings. Results from the research reported here indicate that the use of formal semantics to model programming languages has a useful contribution to make to the task of student modelling.

Scientists are trending towards usage of high-level programming languages such as Python. The convenience of these languages often have a performance cost. As the amount of data being processed increases this can make using these languages unfeasible. Parallelism is a means to achieve better performance, but many users are unaware of it, or find it difficult to work with. This thesis presents ParForPy, a means for loop-parallelization to to simplify usage of parallelism in Python for users. Discussion is included for determining when parallelism matches well with the problem. Results are given that indicate that ParForPy is both capable of improving program execution time and perceived to be a simpler construct to understand than other techniques for parallelism in Python.

This thesis investigates nondeterminism in functional programming languages. To establish a precise understanding of nondeterministic language properties, Sondergaard and Sestoft's analysis and definitions of functional language properties are adopted as are the characterizations of weak and strong nondeterminism. This groundwork is followed by a denotational semantic description of a nondeterministic language (suggested by Sondergaard and Sestoft). In this manner, a precise characterization of the effects of strong nondeterminism is developed. Methods used to hide nondeterminism to in order to overcome or sidestep the problem of strong nondeterminism in pure functional languages are defined. These different techniques ensure that functional languages remain pure but also include some of the advantages of nondeterminism. Lastly, this discussion of nondeterminism is applied to the area of functional parallel language implementation to indicate that the related problem and the possible solutions are not purely academic. This application gives rise to an interesting discussion on optimization of list parallelism. This technique relies on the ability to decide when a bag may be used instead of a list.