Welcome to Spivey's Corner

From Spivey's Corner

http://spivey.oriel.ox.ac.uk/corner

Michael Spivey

This Wiki provides course materials and a discussion forum for the lecture courses that I give to Computer Science students in Oxford.

Some pages will contain course material, and I will protect those pages from editing, so that everyone can see the material as I presented it. But each protected page will have an associated discussion page, and you are welcome to add comments there, or to make additions to any of the other pages. To make edits, you will need to create an account for yourself, but anyone in Oxford is welcome to do so.

The Wiki currently contains material for the following (current) courses:

• Compilers, for second and third year students in Hilary Term, 2011.
• [Principles of] Programming Languages, for Michaelmas Term, 2011.

There are also some materials for other courses that I've passed on to others:

• Imperative Programming I.
• Object-Oriented Programming, now taught as Imperative Programming II.
• Digital Hardware.
• Operating Systems.
• Computer Architecture.
• Algorithm Development and Correctness.
• Category Theory for Functional Programming.
• Logic Programming.

Classes and tutorials

• A collection of past exam papers for Computer Science.
• Class sign up and contact details for The Consortium.
• A small collection of preparatory problems.

Rag-bag

• Slides for a talk to the student Computer Society at Oxford.
• Some notes about installing Minix 2 on virtual machines.
• A page for outreach stuff.
• A page for draft papers.
• A note about what WeakHashMap is good for.
• A page of random links.
• Some apt quotations.
• A few benchmark results.
• A note about invariants for an algorithm that decides equivalence of deterministic finite automata.
• A note on twice twice twice.
• A tale of woe about FDR.
• A Kripke kōan that illuminates the differences between LTL and CTL.
• A list of Undergraduate and M.Sc. projects that I would like to supervise.
• A note about Internet Explorer and Unicode.
• Obfuscated PDF.
• Design documents for the Oxford Oberon-2 compiler.
• Printing the New Testament in Greek.
• The root of the Tangerine Tree.
• Some stuff about Lego Mindstorms NXT.
• Pages for tutors.

About Spivey's Corner

In view of the name, I should make it clear that this Wiki bears no relationship to the community of Spivey's Corner, NC, despite the fact that the latter is home to the U.S. National Hollerin' Contest.^[1] To paraphrase the Wikipedia article, this Wiki ...

was inaugurated in order to revive the almost-lost art of "lecturin'", a sophisticated vocal tradition that served as a means of short-distance communication between individuals as well as an amusing form of entertainment, before the widespread adoption of PowerPoint.

Those more interested in hollerin' than in lecturin' may prefer to visit the home page of the National Hollerin' Contest itself.

This Wiki also bears no relationship to Spivey's Web, a shop in Macclesfield that apparently stocks ladies' shoes in men's sizes.

And this just in: we have nothing at all to do with the newly-formed North Carolina college rock band of the same name (broken link).

1. ↑ Some people have skeptically alleged that Spivey's Corner is no more than a PhotoShop-enhanced figment of my imagination. A Google map proves otherwise.