Re: Compiler Construction in Ada

bpb9204@tamsun.tamu.edu (Brent Burton)
Mon, 11 Jan 1993 03:08:45 GMT

          From comp.compilers

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[2 earlier articles]
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada davidm@questor.rational.com (1993-01-07)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (1993-01-07)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada brent@rcx1.ssd.csd.harris.com (1993-01-08)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada crigler@osceola.cs.ucf.edu (1993-01-08)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada robichau@lambda.msfc.nasa.gov (1993-01-08)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (1993-01-10)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada bpb9204@tamsun.tamu.edu (1993-01-11)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada eifrig@beanworld.cs.jhu.edu (1993-01-12)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada moss@cs.cmu.edu (1993-01-13)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada dtl8v@holmes.acc.Virginia.EDU (1993-01-15)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada hagerman@ece.cmu.edu (1993-01-15)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada adam@microware.com (1993-01-15)
Re: Compiler Construction in Ada andrewd@cs.adelaide.edu.au (Andrew Dunstan) (1993-01-17)
| List of all articles for this month |

Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.compilers
From: bpb9204@tamsun.tamu.edu (Brent Burton)
Organization: Texas A&M Univ., Inc.
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 1993 03:08:45 GMT
Keywords: courses, Ada, books
References: 93-01-048 93-01-057

mfeldman@seas.gwu.edu (Michael Feldman) writes:
|The original poster, Prof. Jipping, prefers the hand-coding approach, on the
|grounds (I suppose) that using tools is great once you have some
|understanding of how they work. Students who have hand-coded parts of
|parsers and lexers really come to appreciate what yex/yacc/aflex/ayacc buy
|you, and that's just the right education for undergraduates (IMHO).


I couldn't agree more.


Last spring I took the compiler design class here and I found it to be an
excellent class. We used the Dragon book and a hand-coded approach while
the language to compile was a subset of Pascal.


This format proved to be quite effective and educational. Through
previous work at IBM, I had experience with lex and yacc already and a
good understanding of the parsing process. However, the hand-coding
approach was, I feel, mandatory to learn the important underlying
algorithms and to better understand the roles lex and yacc play. After
the the discussion about LL and LALR parsers, I could finally understand
the shift/reduce and reduce/reduce errors. ;-)


In short, I'd suggest the hand-coding approach. Learning definitely comes
from doing, and the lex and yacc-based course doesn't provide that extra
depth of knowledge.


-Brent, waiting anxiously for the graduate compiler design this spring
--
Brent Burton N5VMG, bpb9204@tamsun.tamu.edu
--


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