[PLUG-TALK] What they teach in CS classes

[Paul Mullen]

On Tue, Dec 06, 2005 at 09:01:28PM -0800, Rich Shepard wrote:
>   It seems like your curriculum is both broad and deep, but you may be
> limited both by time constraints and the expertise and abilities of the
> instructors. That's frustrating, isn't it?

I was impressed by the Operating Systems course taught at PSU.
They also use the Tanenbaum "Modern Operating Systems" text. All of the
assignments are based around the woefully-named "SPANK" system, a software
emulation of a simplified (for didactic purposes) RISC-based computer
system. Programs are a written in a combination of SPANK assembly and
"Spankish", a Smalltalk-like high(er) level language.  Needless to say,
having an emulated hardware platform available when you're troubleshooting
kernel-related code is pretty helpful.

All of the homework assignments deal directly with essential kernel
services like process/thread scheduling, memory management, etc. The
student implements a fair amount of these services.

The SPANK system was created by Harry Porter, one of PSU's CS
professors. You can read all about it (and download the source) at his
university site:

<http://www.cs.pdx.edu/~harry/spank/>


Paul