Lecture: Sequential Programming vs. Concurrent Programming

Description

Lecture Description

Example in Which Writing Past the End of Array Causes the Return Address of the Function to be Overwritten, Leading to An Infinite Loop, Example in Which Data Is Incorrectly Shared between Two Different Functions, But Can Still be Printed Out Due to the Structure of the Activation Record (Channelling), How Printf's Prototype Uses "...", Which Allows It to Take A Variable Number of Arguments, Why Parameters Are Pushed Onto the Stack From Right to Left, in the Context of Printf Crawling Up the Stack And Functions With A Variable Number of Arguments, Justification For Structs' Fields being Laid Out Sequentially in Memory, in Terms of Casting between Different Structs With Similar Internal Structures, Sequential Programming Vs. Concurrent Programming, Example of Many Different Processes Running in Separate Virtual Address Spaces, Each Mapped to Physical Addresses by A Central Memory Management Unit, How Concurrent Programming (Multiprocessing) Allows Mutiple Processes to Seemingly Run At the Same Time, How Multithreading Allows Multiple Functions in Run 'Simultaneously' Within One Process (E.G. the office Assistant in Microsoft office Or Downloading Songs in Itunes), Real-World Situation that Can be Modeled Using Threads (10 Ticket Agents Simultaneously Selling 150 Tickets)

Course Description

Topics include: Advanced memory management features of C and C++; the differences between imperative and object-oriented paradigms; the functional paradigm (using LISP) and concurrent programming (using C and C++); brief survey of other modern languages such as Python, Objective C, and C#.

Prerequisites: Programming and problem solving at the Programming Abstractions level. Prospective students should know a reasonable amount of C++. You should be comfortable with arrays, pointers, references, classes, methods, dynamic memory allocation, recursion, linked lists, binary search trees, hashing, iterators, and function pointers. You should be able to write well-decomposed, easy-to-understand code, and understand the value that comes with good variable names, short function and method implementations, and thoughtful, articulate comments.

from course: Computer Science III: Programming Paradigms