Re: Compiler Construction in Ada

moss@cs.cmu.edu (Eliot Moss)
Wed, 13 Jan 1993 19:53:23 GMT

          From comp.compilers

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[4 earlier articles]
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 Learning (was... in Ada) jao@soc1.acpub.duke.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)
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.compilers
From: moss@cs.cmu.edu (Eliot Moss)
Organization: Dept of Comp and Info Sci, Univ of Mass (Amherst)
Date: Wed, 13 Jan 1993 19:53:23 GMT
Keywords: Ada, courses
References: 93-01-048 93-01-066

I have taught a compiler course four times, and much prefer having the
students learn to use an off the shelf parser generator (yacc/bison
style). I do have them write a lexer themselves -- it's actually easier
for many languages, since lex is a bit tricky to use and get comments,
etc., right.


Reacting to previous postings, I don't think deep understanding of the
syntactic aspects is quite the important thing. It is much more important
to gain understanding of type checking, semantic processing in general,
code generation, and the role of optimization, in my opinion. Many people
concentrate on the syntactic stuff because it's clean and theoretical, but
the tools make it by the far the easiest part of compiling, so to me it
does not seem the smart place to spend limited classroom time.


Just one professor's view, but it seems to work.
--
J. Eliot B. Moss, Associate Professor Visiting Associate Professor
Department of Computer Science School of Computer Science
Lederle Graduate Research Center Carnegie Mellon University
University of Massachusetts 5000 Forbes Avenue
Amherst, MA 01003 Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3891
(413) 545-4206, 545-1249 (fax) (412) 268-6767, 681-5739 (fax)
Moss@cs.umass.edu Moss@cs.cmu.edu
--


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