Re: Mathematics skills for writing a compiler?

On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 12:04:30PM -0400, Jack wrote:
> What mathematical skills do I need in order to build an "average" compiler?
> such as numerical methods, CFG, DFS.... etc


To write a compiler, the main thing you need is some background in
formal language and automata theory. All three levels of the Chomsky
Hierarchy are used in the construction of a compiler: most lexical
analyzers are based on regular languages, most parsing is done using
deterministic subsets of context-free languages, and well, all target
architectures are essentially linear bounded automata that can be
idealized as Turing machines. Naturally algorithms and data structures
are a necessity, and graph theory is certainly useful, in order to
swallow some of the techniques for code generation and optimization.
Numerical methods are not needed unless you're planning on designing the
successor to FORTRAN, a dialect of Matlab, or some other language that
specifically has numerical analysis as its problem domain.


--
dido
Te capiam, cuniculus sceleste!

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