Re: Mathematics skills for writing a compiler?

lucky7456969@hotmail.com (Jack) writes:


> What mathematical skills do I need in order to build an "average"
> compiler? such as numerical methods, CFG, DFS.... etc


You don't need numerical methods at all, unless you want to make
nontrivial optimizations of numerical code, but that hardly
constitutes an "average" compiler. If you want to build your own
parser and lexer (or understand the generators you are using), some
theory of grammars, regular expressions and automata will be useful.
Some graph algorithms (graph colouring, DFS, dominators, etc.) will be
useful, but for a non-optimizing compiler you really only need
colouring (for the register allocator). Understanding of invariants
is very useful, but that applies not only to compilers (though it may
be more important here, as you have to understand invariants in both
the compiler and the generated code). A general knowledge of
datastructures and algorithms (such as sorting, searching, hashtables,
tree structures, etc.) will also be useful. But very little "hard
math".


Torben

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