Re: Compiler Construction in Ada

moss@cs.cmu.edu (Eliot Moss) writes:
>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.


dtl8v@holmes.acc.Virginia.EDU (Heracleitus) writes:
> I have to agree with this point of view. I took a class in programming
>languages that involved writing a nearly-full front end for a Unity


Just another student's point of view:


I took a compilers class where we wrote a simple lexical analyzer, then a
simple parser from scratch. We then took a skeleton tiny-c lex/yacc
definition and expanded on it to the point of having a working compiler
(including peephole optimizations, not including the assembler).


This seemed to give a proper perspective on how important tools (lex/yacc)
can be, while at the same time not wasting too much time implementing
something which could better by done by the tools.
--
Adam G.
adamg@microware.com, or ...!uunet!mcrware!adamg
--

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