Re: How to justify teaching compilers

Pg Nor Jaidi Pg Tuah wrote:
> If you can compromise and reduce compiler to just a few hours of
> lectures (embedded in, say, "systems programming"), what would you
> cover?


Compiler writing course puts together lots of different subjects the
student should know: computer architecture, machine and/or assembly
language programming, finite automata and regular expressions,
context-free languages, grammars and parsing, several data structures,
modular programming, programming tools, etc. Because of that it seems
to be one of the best reasonably large projects to be included in a
CS/CE curriculum. Understanding the working of a compiler helps in
many contexts (eg. XML parsing, regular expressions in several
languages and shells), even if tools are being used. There is also the
fact noticed above by our moderator.


-- Tomasz Kowaltowski

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