This study examined the integration of Small Basic as a new technology in computer courses of elementary schools in Turkey and investigated the perceptions of students and teachers of elementary school about the use of Small Basic in their computer courses in terms of its effects on their perceived motivation, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Also, information from teachers about advantages and disadvantages of this technology, and the suggestions of teachers about the use of this technology and the content was gathered. A case study was conducted in the form of an action research / that is, this study used components of case study by action research. The data were collected from 4th and 5th grade students of Plevene Elementary School by using a questionnaire. Also, interviews were conducted with the teachers. Descriptive statistics, frequency distributions and descriptive analysis methods were used to analyze the results. The findings of the study showed that Small Basic is accepted by students and all teachers as a new technology. Also, students and teachers stated that using this technology affected students&#039 / perceived motivation towards computer courses positively. Moreover, the students and the teachers perceived that Small Basic is a useful and easy to use technology. Moreover, it was stated that the students and the teachers are satisfied with advantages of the use of this new technology in their learning environment.

This thesis presents TransLucid, a low-level, purely declarative, intensional programming language. Built on a simple algebra and with just a small number of primitives, TransLucid programs define arbitrary dimensional infinite data structures, which are then queried to produce results. The formal foundations of TransLucid come from the work in intensional logic by Montague and Scott. The background chapters give a history of intensional logic and its predecessors in the Western world, as well as a history of intensional programming and Lucid, the first intensional programming language. The semantics of TransLucid are fully specified in the form of operational semantics. Three levels of semantics are given, in increasing order of efficiency, with the sequential warehouse semantics, the most efficient, being presented together with a proof that any expression will be evaluated by only examining relevant dimensions in the current context. The language is then extended in three important ways, by adding versioned identifiers, (declarative) side-effects and timestamped equations and demands. Adding versioned identifiers to TransLucid enriches the expressiveness of the language and allows the encoding of a variety of programming paradigms, ranging from manipulating large data-cubes to pattern-matching. Adding side-effects supports one of the main reasons for TransLucid: namely, to provide a target language, together with a methodology, for translating the main programming paradigms, thus creating a uniform end platform that can be the focus for optimisation and program verification. A translation of imperative programs into TransLucid is given. Timestamped equations and demands enable TransLucid to become a language for synchronous programming in real-time systems, as well as allowing runtime updates to a program's equations. The language TransLucid represents a decisive advance in declarative programming. It has applications in many fields of computer science and opens up exciting new avenues of research.

Abstract The removal of overlying waste rock in open pit mines to dumps is conventionally undertaken by draglines or by trucks and shovels, or by a combination of these. Waste rock dumps are the largest remnant structures of open cut mining operations and can absorb a large proportion of the mine operating costs. If the dumps are not properly developed they can be excessively expensive and can become a major safety risk and environmental hazard. There are many examples worldwide where poor design and construction of waste rock dumps have resulted in failures causing considerable loss of life and widespread damage, or have resulted in erosion and seepage that have led to severe environmental pollution. The proper design and scheduling of waste rock dumps and haul routes can significantly reduce costs, minimise the possibility of failures, and avoid harming the environment. This Thesis is limited to the consideration of trucks and shovels for waste rock haulage in open cut mining operations. It describes the development and application of a waste rock dump scheduling model using the Operations Research technique of Mixed-Integer Linear Programming, implemented in the mathematical modelling language AMPL. The model focuses on minimising the haulage cost for each block of waste rock taken from the open pit and placed in the dump. Allowance is made for the selective placement of benign and reactive waste rock, based on an open pit block model that delineates benign and reactive waste rock. The formulation requires input data including the xyz-coordinates of the block model for the open pit, information on whether the waste rock blocks are benign or reactive, the proposed time scheduling of waste rock haulage from the open pit, unit haulage costs, and the geometry of the waste rock dump, including the delineation of the zones that are benign and those that are reactive. The model was successfully tested by using both simple test data and actual mine site data. The application of the model to a simple case confirmed that it produces results that meet the Objective Function in producing an optimal haulage time and cost, and meets the various Constraints imposed. This model for scheduling the removal of waste rock from open cut mining operations with trucks and shovels will require further research and testing and, because the results are generated in a numerical format, there will also be a need to convert them to a graphical format to facilitate their interpretation. Ultimately, it will have the potential to provide a relatively low-cost scheduling tool that meets operators’ economic, safety and environmental goals.

We present a general semantic account of Gifford-style type-and-effect systems. These type systems provide lightweight static analyses annotating program phrases with the sets of possible computational effects they may cause, such as memory access and modification, exception raising, and non-deterministic choice. The analyses are used, for example, to justify the program transformations typically used in optimising compilers, such as code reordering and inlining. Despite their existence for over two decades, there is no prior comprehensive theory of type-and-effect systems accounting for their syntax and semantics, and justifying their use in effect-dependent program transformation. We achieve this generality by recourse to the theory of algebraic effects, a development of Moggi’s monadic theory of computational effects that emphasises the operations causing the effects at hand and their equational theory. The key observation is that annotation effects can be identified with the effect operations. Our first main contribution is the uniform construction of semantic models for typeand- effect analysis by a process we call conservative restriction. Our construction requires an algebraic model of the unannotated programming language and a relevant notion of predicate. It then generates a model for Gifford-style type-and-effect analysis. This uniform construction subsumes existing ad-hoc models for type-and-effect systems, and is applicable in all cases in which the semantics can be given via enriched Lawvere theories. Our second main contribution is a demonstration that our theory accounts for the various aspects of Gifford-style effect systems. We begin with a version of Levy’s Callby- push-value that includes algebraic effects. We add effect annotations, and design a general type-and-effect system for such call-by-push-value variants. The annotated language can be thought of as an intermediate representation used for program optimisation. We relate the unannotated semantics to the conservative restriction semantics, and establish the soundness of program transformations based on this effect analysis. We develop and classify a range of validated transformations, generalising many existing ones and adding some new ones. We also give modularly-checkable sufficient conditions for the validity of these optimisations. In the final part of this thesis, we demonstrate our theory by analysing a simple example language involving global state with multiple regions, exceptions, and nondeterminism. We give decision procedures for the applicability of the various effect-dependent transformations, and establish their soundness and completeness.

The subject of this investigation is a specific set of parsers known as LR parsers. Of primary interest is a LR parsing method developed by DeRemer which specifies a translation method which can be defined by a Deterministic Push-Down Automation (DPDA). The method of investigation was to apply DeRemer's parsing technique to a specific language known as THIS Programming Language (TPL). The syntax of TPL was redefined as state diagrams and these state diagrams were, in turn, encoded into two tables--a State-Action table and a Transition table. The tables were then incorporated into a PL/l adaptation of DeRemer's algorithm and tested against various TPL statements.

In this thesis, the first chapter provides the general description of this interpreter. The second chapter contains a formal definition of the syntax of BASIC along with an introduction to the semantics. The third chapter contains the design of data structure. The fourth chapter contains the description of algorithms along with stages for testing the interpreter and the design of debug output. The stages and actions-are represented internally to the computer in tabular forms. For statement parsing working syntax equations are established. They serve as standards for the conversion of source statements into object pseudocodes. As the statement is parsed for legal form, pseudocodes for this statement are created. For pseudocode execution, pseudocodes are represented internally to the computer in tabular forms.

The work presented in this dissertation contributes to the field of programming lan- guage design and implementation for stream processing applications. There is a fast-expanding domain of stream processing applications which demand processing high-volume streams quickly and often in real time. Examples include analysis and synthesis of audio, video and other digital media, sensor array signals, real-time phys- ical simulation etc. High performance is crucial in this domain. When choosing between available programming methods, the programmer often chooses one that maximizes performance while sacrificing ease of programming, code comprehension, maintainability and reusability. This work contributes towards improving the state of the art by jointly maximizing these aspects. High-volume streams are often most naturally represented as multi-dimensional arrays with one infinite dimension representing time. Algorithms working with such streams are typically defined mathematically using recurrence equations. A pro- gramming language is presented in this dissertation which enables an almost literal translation of such mathematical definitions to computer programs. The language also supports powerful facilities for abstraction and code reuse such as polymorphic and higher-order functions. Together, these features enable a more natural expression of algorithms and improve code modularity and reusability. A major contribution of this dissertation is the compilation of the proposed lan- guage in the polyhedral framework, specifically targeting general-purpose multi-core processors. This framework provides powerful means of analysis and transformations of computations on multi-dimensional arrays, which enables data-locality optimiza- tions essential for high performance on general-purpose processors with deep memory hierarchies. The benefit of this framework for computations on finite arrays has been extensively explored. However, this dissertation presents essential extensions that enable the application of state-of-the-art optimizations in this framework on infinite arrays representing streams. / Graduate

[pt] O Common Language Runtime (CLR) é uma plataforma criada com o objetivo de facilitar a interoperabilidade entre diferentes linguagens de programação, através de uma linguagem intermediária (a Common Intermediate Language, ou CIL) e um sistema de tipos comum (o Common Type System, ou CTS). Lua é uma linguagem de script flexível e de sintaxe simples; linguagens de script são frequentemente usadas para juntar componentes escritos em outras linguagens, para construir protótipos de aplicações, e em arquivos de configuração. Este trabalho apresenta duas abordagens de integração entre a linguagem Lua e o CLR, com o objetivo de permitir que scripts Lua instanciem e usem componentes escritos para o CLR. A primeira abordagem é a de criar uma ponte entre o interpretador Lua e o CLR, sem modificar o interpretador. Os recursos e a implementação desta ponte são mostrados, e ela é comparada com trabalhos que seguem a mesma abordagem. A segunda abordagem é a de compilar as instruções da máquina virtual do interpretador Lua para instruções da Common Intermediate Language Do CLR, sem introduzir mudanças na linguagem Lua. A implementação de um compilador de instruções Lua para CIL é mostrada, e o desempenho de scripts compilados por ele é comparado com o desempenho dos mesmos scripts executados pelo interpretador Lua e com o de scripts equivalentes compilados por outros compiladores de linguagens de script para o CLR. / [en] The Common Language Runtime (CLR) is a platform that aims to make the interoperability among different programming languages easier, by using a common language (the Common Intermediate Language, or CIL) and a common type system (the Common Type System, or CTS). Lua is a flexible scripting language with a simple syntax; scripting languages are frequently used to join components written in other languages, to build application prototypes, and in configuration files. This work presents two approachs for integratiion between the Lua language and the CLR, with the objective of allowing Lua scripts to instantiate and use components written for the CLR. The first approach is to create a bridge between the Lua interpreter and the CLR, without changing the interpreter. The features and implementation of this bridge are shown, and it is compared with other work following the same approach. The second approach is to compile the virtual-machine instructions of the Lua interpreter to instructions of the CLR s Common Intermediate Language, without introducing changes to the Lua language. The implementation of a Lua instructions to CIL compiler is shown, and the performance of scripts compiled by it is compared with the performance of the same scripts run by the Lua interpreter and with the performance of equivalent scripts compiled by compilers of other scripting language to the CLR.

Digital games are part of our culture and have gained significant attention over the last decade. The growing capabilities of home computers, gaming consoles and mobile phones allow current games to visualise 3D virtual worlds, photo-realistic characters and the inclusion of complex physical simulations. The growing computational power of those devices enables the usage of complex algorithms while visualising data. Therefore, opportunities arise for developers of interactive products such as digital games which introduce new, challenging and exciting elements to the next generation of highly interactive software systems. Two of those challenges, which current systems do not address adequately, are design support for creating Intelligent Virtual Agents and more believable non-player characters for immersive game-play. We start in this thesis by addressing the agent design support first and then extend the research, addressing the second challenge. The main contributions of this thesis are: - The POSH-SHARP system is a framework for the development of game agents. The platform is modular, extendable, offers multi-platform support and advanced software development features such as behaviour inspection and behaviour versioning. The framework additionally integrates an advanced information exchange mechanism supporting loose behaviour coupling. - The Agile behaviour design methodology integrates agile software development and agent design. To guide users, the approach presents a work-flow for agent design and guiding heuristics for their development. - The action selection augmentation ERGo introduces a "white-box" solution to altering existing agent frameworks, making their agents less deterministic. It augments selected behaviours with a bio-mimetic memory to track and adjust their activation over time. With the new approach to agent design, the development of "deepagent" behaviour for digital adversaries and advanced tools supporting their design is given. Such mechanisms should enable developers to build robust non-player characters that act more human-like in an efficient and robust manner. Within this thesis, different strategies are identified to support the design of agents in a more robust manner and to guide developers. These discussed mechanisms are then evolved to develop and design Intelligent Virtual Agents. Because humans are still the best measurement for human-likeness, the evolutionary cycle involves feedback given by human players.

The aim of this Diploma thesis is to get acquitained with the approaches to parallel programming and possibilities of their practical implementation, including possibilities of their usage in management. An important part of the Diploma thesis is the practical implementation of parallel program in a PC cluster environment, which was implemented in computer laboratory of Faculty of Management VŠE. The practical part consists of an example of decision-making under uncertainty (risk) which is solved with the employment of the Monte Carlo method.