Robert Walton
- My main research effort is to build a
new programming language
that will be usable by commercial programmers, while being
accessible to average high school students,
who should be able to modify and augment
parts of programs written in the language.
- I worked with Prof. Thomas Cheatham with his last
main research effort, the
World Beyond the Web
project, which I am continuing (although slowly).
Prof. Cheatham passed away in June, 2001.
- I am also very interested in the formal description of computer
systems. Some of my writings on this topic are:
- I've been the coach of the
Harvard Computing Contest Club
(HC^3),
and in this capacity, have developed a large system,
HPCM, for running
programming contests. I hope to augment this system to
perform automatic grading for courses for advanced students, and
apply this, perhaps in 2004 or 2005, to an online no-credit introductory
`course' (NOT AN OFFICIAL HARVARD COURSE)
in Symbolic Computing.
- Some of the courses I have taught are:
-
Computer Science 254, Programming Methodologies.
-
Computer Science 152, fall 1998, a Principles of Programming
Languages course. This is my version of a course that was
previously taught for many years by Prof. Shieber. Included are
many short papers on topics such as abstract syntax and
deduction systems for various small languages.
-
Computer Science 96 (1995-1997),
a System Design Projects course in which the students form
a company roughly similar to a government software contractor.
Taught by Dr. Walton and Prof. Cheatham in the years 1995-1997.
-
Computer Science 51, summer 1999,
handouts for this standard Harvard CS course that
I taught for four years (1996-1999) in the Harvard summer school,
with extensive
revisions to streamline the first 60% of the standard course and
increase its theoretical content. Included is a draft of a
book
that covers the first third of the course on pure LISP, expression rewriting,
propositional calculus, search, and resolution theorem proving.
-
Gentle Introduction to Computers, Programming, and Algorithms,
a very elementary C textbook. Current version is completely based on a variant
of Karel the Robot.
An older version with a purely numeric introductory chapter.
An even older version based on words-and-phrases data instead of Karel.
- Miscellaneous Stuff: