Re: Appel Book : Modern Compiler Implementation In C ??

Sahan Amarasekera <sahan_a@my-deja.com> writes:


[ how is the Appel Book for beginners? ]


I think the book strikes a nice balance between theory and
practice. The theory behing many things get explained without being
overly formal and also gets demonstrated in working code. If you
follow the exercises you end up with a working compiler. There's also
a nice balance between the subject. I've always found parsing gets too
much attention in the Dragon Book.


One caveat though. I've read the Java version and the Java code shown
is disguised ML. I don't know whether the C version is the same, but
in that case I would recommend the ML version proper. It seems to be
endemic that authors don't bother to write the other language versions
of their books in idiomatic code. Sedgewick's Algorithms in C is very
Pascal-ish and Numerical Recipes is only understandable in Fortran.

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