How to justify teaching compilers

"Pg Nor Jaidi Pg Tuah" <jaidi@fos.ubd.edu.bn>
2 Oct 2004 01:15:50 -0400

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
How to justify teaching compilers jaidi@fos.ubd.edu.bn (Pg Nor Jaidi Pg Tuah) (2004-10-02)
Re: How to justify teaching compilers mayan@bestweb.net (Mayan Moudgill) (2004-10-02)
Re: How to justify teaching compilers thomas.claveirole@lrde.epita.fr (Thomas Claveirole) (2004-10-02)
Re: How to justify teaching compilers max@gustavus.edu (Max Hailperin) (2004-10-02)
Re: How to justify teaching compilers Juergen.Kahrs@vr-web.de (=?ISO-8859-1?Q?J=FCrgen_Kahrs?=) (2004-10-04)
Re: How to justify teaching compilers tk@ic.unicamp.br (Tomasz Kowaltowski) (2004-10-04)
Re: How to justify teaching compilers genew@mail.ocis.net (Gene Wirchenko) (2004-10-04)
[8 later articles]
| List of all articles for this month |

From: "Pg Nor Jaidi Pg Tuah" <jaidi@fos.ubd.edu.bn>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 2 Oct 2004 01:15:50 -0400
Organization: Compilers Central
Keywords: courses, question
Posted-Date: 02 Oct 2004 01:15:50 EDT

Dear compiler-loving academics,


With the fast expanding frontier of computer science, and the
(unreasonable) expectation that CS graduates be fully "productive"
from day 1 of their work, CS curriculum must include more "hot"
topics, squeezing out "old fashioned" stuff.


Thus I find my "compiler is fun" argument losing to "compiler
knowledge is not so useful anymore" argument, especially when more
than half of the students would likely find the subject terribly
difficult. If you are in this situation, and you have no strong
compiler research group to back you up (if you have a compiler
research group, you wouldn't be in this situation, would you?), how
would you justify keeping/introducing your beloved compiler course?


If you can compromise and reduce compiler to just a few hours of
lectures (embedded in, say, "systems programming"), what would you
cover?


nice day
jaidi
[I don't think many CS students are likely to write a C compiler,
but most of them are going to write things that are scanners or parsers,
even if they don't call them that. -John]



Post a followup to this message

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.