[pt] Se diz que uma linguagem de programação tem funções de primeira classe quando ela fornece a capacidade de manipular funções da mesma maneira que outros valores, isto é, guardar em variáveis, passar como parâmetros, etc.. Programar com funções de primeira classe abre o programadora novas formas de abstração e é o padrão em linguagens de programação funcionais. Porém, se tratando de linguagens imperativas (incluindo linguagens orientadas a objeto), cada linguagem tem semântica, propriedades e terminologia diferentes para funções—em grande parte graças a seu foco em mutabilidade, que as linguagens funcionais não têm. Para esclarecer essas diferenças, nós fizemos um levantamento sobre a especificação de funções como valores em linguagens de programação imperativas de várias disciplinas diferentes. Para cada linguagem, nós ilustramos, nos baseando em exemplos, as propriedades dos valores de funções nela,destacando onde ela difere de outras linguagens—tudo isso usando uma terminologia consistente em todas as linguagens. Nós esperamos oferecer uma referência para desenvolvedores compararem e contrastarem as diferentes versões de funções num só lugar. / [en] A programming language is said to have first-class functions when it provides the capability of manipulating functions in the same way as other values, i.e., storing in variables, passing as parameters, etc.. Programming with first-class functions opens the programmer to new forms of abstractions and it s the default in functional programming languages. However, in the realm of imperative languages (including object-oriented languages), each language has different semantics, properties, and terminology for functions—in great part, thanks to their focus on mutability, which isn t present in functional languages. To help shed light on these differences, we made a survey of the specifi-cation of function values in imperative programming languages from many different disciplines. For each language, we illustrate, based on examples,the properties of function values in it, highlighting where it differs from other languages—all this with a consistent terminology in all languages. We provide a reference that compares and contrasts different renditions offunctions in one single place and conclude that the design of functions in a language depends on the interaction of its features and constraints with its functions.

The quest for a better way to learn and teach programming, in particular object-oriented programming, is a challenge that continues to intrigue computer science educators. Even after decades of research in learning to program, educators still search for the optimal instructional approach that will solve the `learning to program effectively' problem among introductory programming students. The aim of this study was to gain insight into, and to suggest possible explanations for, the "qualitatively different ways" in which students experience learning to program using an object-oriented programming language, and to recommend teaching and learning strategies as a result of the outcomes of the research. In order to achieve these aims, a combination of phenomenographic research methods and elements of activity theory have been employed to gain an in depth understanding of pre- and in-service teachers' learning experiences. The categories of description for the phenomenon, learning to program and the influence of the learning context have been analysed and described in detail. It is argued that understanding learning to program using Java, in order to teach programming involves more than understanding learning to program as it is normally taught in university programming courses. In addition to object-oriented concepts such as message passing, inheritance, polymorphism, delegation and overriding, it entails understanding how learning to program is reflected in the goals of instruction and in different instructional practices. Knowledge of learning to program must also be linked to knowledge of students' thinking, so that teachers have conceptions of typical trajectories of student learning, and can use this knowledge to recognize landmarks of understanding in individuals. The findings suggest relationships among students' affective appraisals of the value of learning to program, their conceptions of learning to program, their approaches to learning it, their evaluations of their performance in tests and examinations and outcomes of their actions. The relationships emerged from student descriptions of their actions and the way in which different aspects of their learning and outcomes related to one another were qualitatively described and in some cases, quantified. In particular, the tensions between prior programming knowledge of a procedural language and current learning of an object-oriented language have emerged in the study. This has implications for teaching, as this study was set against the backdrop of the change in programming language in high schools, from a procedural to an object-oriented language. / Mathematical Sciences / PhD (Maths, Science and Technology Education)

The purpose of this thesis is to present solutions to overcome several key difficulties that limit the application of numerical modelling in communication cable design and analysis. In particular, specific limiting factors are that simulations are time consuming, and the process of comparison requires skill and is poorly defined and understood. When much of the process of design consists of optimisation of performance within a well defined domain, the use of artificial intelligence techniques may reduce or remove the need for human interaction in the design process. The automation of human processes allows round-the-clock operation at a faster throughput. Achieving a speedup would permit greater exploration of the possible designs, improving understanding of the domain. This thesis presents work that relates to three facets of the efficiency of numerical modelling: minimizing simulation execution time, controlling optimization processes and quantifying comparisons of results. These topics are of interest because simulation times for most problems of interest run into tens of hours. The design process for most systems being modelled may be considered an optimisation process in so far as the design is improved based upon a comparison of the test results with a specification. Development of software to automate this process permits the improvements to continue outside working hours, and produces decisions unaffected by the psychological state of a human operator. Improved performance of simulation tools would facilitate exploration of more variations on a design, which would improve understanding of the problem domain, promoting a virtuous circle of design. The minimization of execution time was achieved through the development of a Parallel TLM Solver which did not use specialized hardware or a dedicated network. Its design was novel because it was intended to operate on a network of heterogeneous machines in a manner which was fault tolerant, and included a means to reduce vulnerability of simulated data without encryption. Optimisation processes were controlled by genetic algorithms and particle swarm optimisation which were novel applications in communication cable design. The work extended the range of cable parameters, reducing conductor diameters for twisted pair cables, and reducing optical coverage of screens for a given shielding effectiveness. Work on the comparison of results introduced ―Colour maps‖ as a way of displaying three scalar variables over a two-dimensional surface, and comparisons were quantified by extending 1D Feature Selective Validation (FSV) to two dimensions, using an ellipse shaped filter, in such a way that it could be extended to higher dimensions. In so doing, some problems with FSV were detected, and suggestions for overcoming these presented: such as the special case of zero valued DC signals. A re-description of Feature Selective Validation, using Jacobians and tensors is proposed, in order to facilitate its implementation in higher dimensional spaces.

Usability aspects of programming languages are often overlooked, yet have a substantial effect on programmer productivity. These issues are even more acute in the field of Inductive Synthesis, where programs are automatically generated from sample expected input and output data, and the programmer needs to be able to comprehend, and confirm or reject the suggested programs. A promising method of Inductive Synthesis, CombInduce, which is particularly suitable for synthesizing recursive programs, is a candidate for improvements in usability as the target language Combilog is not user-friendly. The method requires the target language to be strictly compositional, hence devoid of variables, yet have the expressiveness of definite clause programs. This sets up a challenging problem for establishing a user-friendly but equally expressive target language. Alternatives to Combilog, such as Quine's Predicate-functor Logic and Schönfinkel and Curry's Combinatory Logic also do not offer a practical notation: finding a more usable representation is imperative. This thesis presents two distinct approaches towards more convenient representations which still maintain compositionality. The first is Visual Combilog (VC), a system for visualizing Combilog programs. In this approach Combilog remains as the target language for synthesis, but programs can be read and modified by interacting with the equivalent diagrams instead. VC is implemented as a split-view editor that maintains the equivalent Combilog and VC representations on-the-fly, automatically transforming them as necessary. The second approach is Combilog with Name Projection (CNP), a textual iteration of Combilog that replaces numeric argument positions with argument names. The result is a language where argument names make the notation more readable, yet compositionality is preserved by avoiding variables. Compositionality is demonstrated by implementing CombInduce with CNP as the target language, revealing that programs with the same level of recursive complexity can be synthesized in CNP equally well, and establishing the underlying method of synthesis can also work with CNP. Our evaluations of the user-friendliness of both representations are supported by a range of methods from Information Visualization, Cognitive Modelling, and Human-Computer Interaction. The increased usability of both representations are confirmed by empirical user studies: an often neglected aspect of language design.

LBIC is a technique for scanning the local quantum efficiency of solar cells. This kind of measurements needs a highly specialized, and time critical controlling software. In 1996 the client, professor Markus Rinio, constructed an LBIC system, and wrote the controlling software as a Turbo-Pascal 7.0 application, running under the MS-DOS 6.22 operating system. By now (2018) both the software and several hardware components are in dire need to be modernized. This thesis thoroughly describes several important aspects of this work, and the considerations needed for a successful result. This includes both very foundational choices about the software architecture, the choice of suitable operating system, the threading model, and the adaptation to new hardware with vastly different behavior. The project also included a new hardware module for position reports and instrument triggering, as well as several adaptations to transform the DOS-based LBIC software into a pleasant modern GUI application.

As IC technologies scale to the nanometer regime, efficient and accurate modeling and analysis of VLSI systems with billions of transistors and interconnects becomes increasingly critical and difficult. VLSI systems impacted by the increasingly high dimensional process-voltage-temperature (PVT) variations demand much more modeling and analysis efforts than ever before, while the analysis of large scale on-chip interconnects that requires solving tens of millions of unknowns imposes great challenges in computer aided design areas. This dissertation presents new methodologies for addressing the above two important challenging issues for large scale on-chip interconnect modeling and analysis: In the past, the standard statistical circuit modeling techniques usually employ principal component analysis (PCA) and its variants to reduce the parameter dimensionality. Although widely adopted, these techniques can be very limited since parameter dimension reduction is achieved by merely considering the statistical distributions of the controlling parameters but neglecting the important correspondence between these parameters and the circuit performances (responses) under modeling. This dissertation presents a variety of performance-oriented parameter dimension reduction methods that can lead to more than one order of magnitude parameter reduction for a variety of VLSI circuit modeling and analysis problems. The sheer size of present day power/ground distribution networks makes their analysis and verification tasks extremely runtime and memory inefficient, and at the same time, limits the extent to which these networks can be optimized. Given today?s commodity graphics processing units (GPUs) that can deliver more than 500 GFlops (Flops: floating point operations per second). computing power and 100GB/s memory bandwidth, which are more than 10X greater than offered by modern day general-purpose quad-core microprocessors, it is very desirable to convert the impressive GPU computing power to usable design automation tools for VLSI verification. In this dissertation, for the first time, we show how to exploit recent massively parallel single-instruction multiple-thread (SIMT) based graphics processing unit (GPU) platforms to tackle power grid analysis with very promising performance. Our GPU based network analyzer is capable of solving tens of millions of power grid nodes in just a few seconds. Additionally, with the above GPU based simulation framework, more challenging three-dimensional full-chip thermal analysis can be solved in a much more efficient way than ever before.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T15:48:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 MarceloBB_DISSERT.pdf: 3279178 bytes, checksum: a9382860941b949e031aeb7781e74e59 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-02-20 / Neste trabalho, apresentamos uma ferramenta cujo intuito ? auxiliar n?o-programadores, jogadores de videogame, na cria??o de extens?es na forma de Add-ons para World of Warcraft, o jogo online. Nele, o usu?rio pode criar extens?es customizando completamente sua interface, de forma a reinventar a sua experi?ncia de jogo e melhorar sua jogabilidade. A cria??o de extens?es para aplicativos e jogos surgiu da crescente necessidade de fornecer aos usu?rios mecanismos eficientes de Programa??o por Usu?rio Final, permitindo que os mesmos preenchessem suas necessidades singulares atrav?s da cria??o, customiza??o e especifica??o de extens?es em software. Em World of Warcraft mais especificamente, os Add-ons exploram um tipo de extens?o na qual os jogadores passam a programar sua pr?pria interface de usu?rio ou a fazer uso de interfaces criadas por outros usu?rios. No entanto, realizar a programa??o dessas extens?es - os Add-ons - n?o ? uma tarefa f?cil. Dentro deste contexto, desenvolvemos a ferramenta EUPAT for WoW (do ingl?s, End-User Programming Assistance Tool for World of Warcraft) que oferece assist?ncia ? cria??o de Add-ons. Al?m disso, investigamos como usu?rios jogadores com e sem conhecimento de programa??o s?o beneficiados. Os resultados desta pesquisa permitiram refletir sobre as estrat?gias de assist?ncia de programa??o por usu?rio final no contexto de jogos

The quest for a better way to learn and teach programming, in particular object-oriented programming, is a challenge that continues to intrigue computer science educators. Even after decades of research in learning to program, educators still search for the optimal instructional approach that will solve the `learning to program effectively' problem among introductory programming students. The aim of this study was to gain insight into, and to suggest possible explanations for, the "qualitatively different ways" in which students experience learning to program using an object-oriented programming language, and to recommend teaching and learning strategies as a result of the outcomes of the research. In order to achieve these aims, a combination of phenomenographic research methods and elements of activity theory have been employed to gain an in depth understanding of pre- and in-service teachers' learning experiences. The categories of description for the phenomenon, learning to program and the influence of the learning context have been analysed and described in detail. It is argued that understanding learning to program using Java, in order to teach programming involves more than understanding learning to program as it is normally taught in university programming courses. In addition to object-oriented concepts such as message passing, inheritance, polymorphism, delegation and overriding, it entails understanding how learning to program is reflected in the goals of instruction and in different instructional practices. Knowledge of learning to program must also be linked to knowledge of students' thinking, so that teachers have conceptions of typical trajectories of student learning, and can use this knowledge to recognize landmarks of understanding in individuals. The findings suggest relationships among students' affective appraisals of the value of learning to program, their conceptions of learning to program, their approaches to learning it, their evaluations of their performance in tests and examinations and outcomes of their actions. The relationships emerged from student descriptions of their actions and the way in which different aspects of their learning and outcomes related to one another were qualitatively described and in some cases, quantified. In particular, the tensions between prior programming knowledge of a procedural language and current learning of an object-oriented language have emerged in the study. This has implications for teaching, as this study was set against the backdrop of the change in programming language in high schools, from a procedural to an object-oriented language. / Mathematical Sciences / PhD (Maths, Science and Technology Education)

The presented thesis deals with the design of the product for intelligent control system for GILD. The first part of the diploma thesis contains a brief summary of the intelligent control system. The thesis is designed schematic diagram of the product, it is also designed printed circuit board according to the product requirements. An integral part of the diploma thesis is the design and implementation of the service algorithm for the product.

The aim of this thesis is to graphically interpret navigation messages from a prototype of global navigation satellite system. The resulting application is implemented in Python programming language for Windows operating system and follows requests from researchers developing the prototype. Necessary terminology together with graphical user interface programming possibilities of object-oriented language Python is a base for theoretical background of this text. Practical part of this research describes a solution for receiving generated messages from the prototype as well as their storing and filtering into useful information. Further, the design of graphical user interface of the application for prototype interactions and other tools used for its configuration are included.