Course Policies

Collaboration Policy Statement

Under the Honor Code at Stanford, each of you is expected to submit your own work in this course. On many occasions, it is useful to ask others (a TA, the instructor, or other students) for hints and debugging help, or to talk generally about problem-solving strategies and presentation. Such activity is both acceptable and encouraged, but you must indicate on your assignments any assistance you received. Any assistance received that is not given proper citation may be considered a violation of the Honor Code. In any event, you are responsible for understanding and being able to explain all of the statements in your homework and exam solutions.


Course Information and Policies

Email Policy:

Questions about lectures, homework and course organization may be sent to the course email address, cs258@cs.stanford.edu. This mailbox will be read by the course staff on a regular schedule, but not necessarily every hour of every day.

Prerequisites:

The prerequisites for the course, as listed in the catalog, are "154 and 157 or Philosophy 151 or equivalent." This is a theoretical course that involves theorems and proofs. The course is self-contained in that all of the definitions needed for course work will be given in lecture and/or reading. However, students will find it useful to have some prior exposure to mathematical logic and, to a lesser extent, basic concepts of computability theory.

Textbook:

The course will follow the textbook, Foundations for Programming Languages, and most or all of the homework will consist of exercises from the text. Students therefore must have access to this book to successfully complete the course.

Handout Hangout:

Handouts and graded homeworks that are not picked up during class will be available from the "Handout Hangout." This is a file cabinet on the fourth floor of Gates, at the entrance to the B Wing of the building. One of the drawers of the file cabinet is marked "CS258."

Course Work and Exams:

The course will involve weekly homework, a take-home midterm exam, and a final exam (possibly a take-home exam).

Homework Submission

Homeworks must be handed in by 5pm on the day they are due.

If you are an SCPD student, and you submit homeworks with a routing slip, those homeworks will be returned to you through SCPD. If you do not use a routing slip (for example, by turning it in through e-mail or by coming to class and handing it in), then the homeworks will be available in class for pick-up, or after that, in the handout hangout on the fourth floor of Gates. The routing slip tells us that you want it sent to your site.

Homework may also be submitted by email, in pdf-format only. In this case, the course assistant must be notified of this mode of submission by email to cs258@cs.stanford.edu by 1pm on the due date.

Participation in Televised Courses

This course may be recorded and broadcast as part of the Stanford Center for Professional Development, and may be viewed by other class participants or in other educational settings. As such, there may be times that you will briefly appear on camera, or that your comments will be incorporated into the audio. If you do not wish to appear on camera, please discuss this with SCPD before the next class session; otherwise it will be understood that you have given your consent to appear on camera.